Looking to power my onion from the battery dock eventually. In the interim I have a battery bank that I intend to use.
Anyone have any power usage stats?
Ideally with a minidock as that's what I'm using for the moment. I could split out a USB and power it from a PSU I have and measure with an amp-metre but thought I'd ask to see if anyone knew?
I run a local music server called Logitech Media Server. It was formerly a company called slim devices that built WiFi enabled internet radios that could stream from a local server and also be controlled locally through a browser or app, it is the same as a Sonos or Bose streaming solution. I currently have 2 Logitech devices and have also built another out of a Raspberry Pi, USB sound card (Pi has terrible audio) and an old Roberts radio. The Pi runs TinyCore linux so everything runs in RAM to stop the SD card being corrupted if it is just turned off.
My thoughts were to hook up a USB soundcard to the omega and run an OpenWRT flavour of opensource squeezbox software. There is one from 2012 called squeezslave, it's only ~200kb and as long as it runs could be what I need.
https://code.google.com/p/squeezeslave/downloads/list?q=label:OpSys-OpenWRT
I thought I'd create this post to see if anyone is interested in something similar.
I recently needed to use the serial. Previously in came up in windows as an unrecognizable device. I have since changed the USB cable and it worked. The USB cable I had was a cheapy and stopped being able to charge my phone (with a lightning adapter). It still powered fine.
Might be worth changing cables first
Telegram is a messaging platform similar to Whatsapp, but you can create bots and use an API to send messages from devices to yourself.
I have been experimenting with using Telegram bots to send notifications and alerts instead of emails.
I thought I'd try it out on the Onion and see what happens! You can also send commands through the bot too although I havnt ventured down that path ie. send a "/lighton" command and the omega switches a specific GPIO pin to 1 to turn a light on.
You should be able to follow the sequence below to get started:
Browse to https://telegram.org and create an account OR download the app on your iDevice or similar and create an account that way. If you have created an account on your device you can login to a web session on the telegram website to send messages via your browser also.
You must get your unique CHATID for your user. Send /getid to @IDBot, it needs to be this specific command to get the answer. This will give you your CHATID which we will use later.
Next create a bot! Send /helpto @BotFather, next to create a bot send /newbot. The BotFather will then ask a couple of questions, first a Name that is just a label and then the username for the bot which must end in Bot. He will send you the API token which again you must keep, although you can ask him to generate another by using the /token message. You should notice there are a load of commands you can ask of the BotFather, I mainly use the /setuserpic which you can use to change the bots avatar!
Next is to install curl which is used to create the HTTP requests, in this case a POST.
opkg update
opkg upgrade
opkg install curl
cd /root
touch telegram.sh
chmod 775 telegram.sh
#!/bin/sh
#
# This script sends whatever is piped to it as a message to the specified Telegram bot
#
message=$( cat )
apiToken=<PLACE API TOKEN HERE>
# example:
# apiToken=123456789:AbCdEfgijk1LmPQRSTu234v5Wx-yZA67BCD
userChatId=<PLACE CHATID HERE>
# example:
# userChatId=123456789
sendTelegram() {
curl -s \
-X POST \
https://api.telegram.org/bot$apiToken/sendMessage \
-d text="$message" \
-d chat_id=$userChatId
}
if [[ -z "$message" ]]; then
echo "Please pipe a message to me!"
else
sendTelegram
fi
echo "Test: Onion Omega FTW!!" | ./telegram.sh
You should get back a return of a valid message from the console and on whatever platform you have Telgram installed on!
One problem I have found is the pipe validation. Within bash it echos a response if nothing is piped. The same bit of code doesnt seem to work for busybox. If anyone has got a better way of doing it let me know!
Hopefully this will get some people thinking of some better ways of notifying people of events!
Hopefully @Boken-Lin will get it added to the Wiki if it is worthy! 
This never got added to the wiki, Im sure someone would find it useful 
i think he means the terminal console, sounds like a good idea, you could use this with a kb plugged in....would be hard to code on it though XD
I've recently been looking at different ways of using my Omega and Pi's.
I've come across Cayenne which uses an agent on a Pi to control it, similar to Onion Cloud without as much granularity.
Also Initial State which looks pretty cool, its a way of recording data from sensors primarily but you can store other datapoints too. So a temp sensor or humidiy sensor, you can stream values to a REST API. Looks promising although there is a free and paid model, the free level could be limiting.
@Lazar-Demin ahhh ok, without a full dock with breakout then if you had something like a breadboard with power, you could power the omega, leaving the serial pins free?
Is there a reason you cant use the builtin Serial interface?
Download the driver and use PuTTY defaults with a speed of 115200.
https://wiki.onion.io/Tutorials/Connecting-to-Omega-via-Serial-Terminal
It seems the easy part of this is the actual opening of the gate. A simple bash or python script can run the appropriate commands to send a signal to open a relay/GPIO pin.
The hard part seems to be the connection between phone (as you want to be mobile!) and the onion.
A couple of ways I can think of:
Each method relies on polling the API of the service, IFTTT DO function would work better as the command structure of Telegram would mean you'd have to a send a command (ie /opengate) whereas the DO presents a nice button on an app you press.
As each method relies on polling an API and you'd want it to be fast I reckon you'd want something like poll every second. I dont know if this is possible because I've not used it before!
IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/maker
Telegram: https://core.telegram.org/api
I did make a post on how to use Telegram for notifications, so you can use this to setup your bots which seems a bit odd at first. https://community.onion.io/topic/499/sending-telegram-messages-via-bots/1
Telegram is a messaging platform similar to Whatsapp, but you can create bots and use an API to send messages from devices to yourself.
I have been experimenting with using Telegram bots to send notifications and alerts instead of emails.
I thought I'd try it out on the Onion and see what happens! You can also send commands through the bot too although I havnt ventured down that path ie. send a "/lighton" command and the omega switches a specific GPIO pin to 1 to turn a light on.
You should be able to follow the sequence below to get started:
Browse to https://telegram.org and create an account OR download the app on your iDevice or similar and create an account that way. If you have created an account on your device you can login to a web session on the telegram website to send messages via your browser also.
You must get your unique CHATID for your user. Send /getid to @IDBot, it needs to be this specific command to get the answer. This will give you your CHATID which we will use later.
Next create a bot! Send /helpto @BotFather, next to create a bot send /newbot. The BotFather will then ask a couple of questions, first a Name that is just a label and then the username for the bot which must end in Bot. He will send you the API token which again you must keep, although you can ask him to generate another by using the /token message. You should notice there are a load of commands you can ask of the BotFather, I mainly use the /setuserpic which you can use to change the bots avatar!
Next is to install curl which is used to create the HTTP requests, in this case a POST.
opkg update
opkg upgrade
opkg install curl
cd /root
touch telegram.sh
chmod 775 telegram.sh
#!/bin/sh
#
# This script sends whatever is piped to it as a message to the specified Telegram bot
#
message=$( cat )
apiToken=<PLACE API TOKEN HERE>
# example:
# apiToken=123456789:AbCdEfgijk1LmPQRSTu234v5Wx-yZA67BCD
userChatId=<PLACE CHATID HERE>
# example:
# userChatId=123456789
sendTelegram() {
curl -s \
-X POST \
https://api.telegram.org/bot$apiToken/sendMessage \
-d text="$message" \
-d chat_id=$userChatId
}
if [[ -z "$message" ]]; then
echo "Please pipe a message to me!"
else
sendTelegram
fi
echo "Test: Onion Omega FTW!!" | ./telegram.sh
You should get back a return of a valid message from the console and on whatever platform you have Telgram installed on!
One problem I have found is the pipe validation. Within bash it echos a response if nothing is piped. The same bit of code doesnt seem to work for busybox. If anyone has got a better way of doing it let me know!
Hopefully this will get some people thinking of some better ways of notifying people of events!
Hopefully @Boken-Lin will get it added to the Wiki if it is worthy!
@fader I did see that the Omega kernel doesnt have the feature enabled for kmod-usb-audio and also another audio related feature. I did try to custom build the kernel but bricked my omega, havn't had time to try again since doing a firmware recovery. It is defo still on my to-do list. @Boken-Lin did say in another thread that they might do a few different releases with differing kernels. If they do, hopefully they'll do one with the USB audio stuff! Until then next time I have some free time I'll try and custom build a firmware again! It's just a pain for me as to do a firmware recovery I have to jam wires into the minidock as my proper dock hasnt turned up yet (Battery dock has been delayed).