huginn

I use a tool called Sonarr to, uhh¹, keep track of when new episodes of television shows are released, regardless of what platform they’re on (Netflix, Prime, iPlayer, whatever) and notify me so I remember to watch it.

For several years, I’ve used IFTTT as the intermediary, receiving webhooks from Sonarr and translating them for Slack:

A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to IFTTT to Slack. — This worked for *years*, but it’s time to retire it.

IFTTT‘s move to kill its Legacy Pro plan² – which I was on – gave me reason to re-assess this configuration. It turns that the only Pro feature I was using was an IFTTT “filter” to convert the Sonarr webhooks to a Slack-friendly-format.

Given that I’m running an installation of Huginn on my home network anyway, I resolved to re-implement this flow in Huginn and cancel my IFTTT subscription.

A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to Huginn to Slack. — Raven-powered automation is the new hotness.

This turned out to be so easy I wonder why I never did it before.

First, I created a Webhook Agent and gave the URL to Sonarr.

Then I connected that to a Slack Agent with the following configuration:

{
  "webhook_url": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/...",
  "channel": "#sonarr",
  "username": "Sonarr",
  "message": "*<https://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id={{series.tvdbId}}|{{series.title}}>*\nNew episodes:{% for episode in episodes %}\n• S{{episode.seasonNumber}}E{{episode.episodeNumber}} {{episode.title}}{% endfor %}",
  "icon": ":tv:"
}

I’ve omitted my Slack webhook URL so you don’t spam me. I tried for far too long to get the pluralize filter to work so it’d say “episode” or “episodes” as appropriate before realising I didn’t care enough and gave up.

Then all I needed to do was re-emit some of the previous webhooks to test it:

Slack chat window showing notifications: (1) a new episode of Resident Alien, announced by IFTTT, (b) the same episode, announced by "Sonarr", (c) two episodes of Marvel's Spidey and His Amazing Friends, also announced by "Sonarr". — As a bonus, I swapped out the IFTTT logo for Slackmoji’s `:tv:` icon and added the “Sonarr” username, as shown in my code sample.

Now I’ll continue to know when there’s new television to watch³!

I love the power and flexibility that Huginn provides to help automate your life. It does many of the things that I used to do with a handful of cron jobs and shell scripts, but all in one convenient place.

Footnotes

¹ I’ve heard there are other uses for the tool. Your mileage may vary. Don’t forget to pay for your content, if possible.

² Like many others, I originally signed up to the plan under the promise that the price would be honoured forever. Turns out “forever” means “three years”: who knew?

³ It’s especially useful when you’re between seasons or a show is on hiatus to be reminded that it’s back and I should go and watch it. Hey, there’s a thought: I wonder if I can extract the subtitles from shows and run them through a summarising LLM to give me a couple of paragraphs reminding me “what happened last series” if the show’s been on a long break?

I’ve been playing with a Flic Hub LR and some Flic 2 buttons. They’re “smart home” buttons, but for me they’ve got a killer selling point: rather than locking you in to any particular cloud provider (although you can do this if you want), you can directly program the hub. This means you can produce smart integrations that run completely within the walls of your house.

Here’s some things I’ve been building:

Prerequisite: Flic Hub to Huginn connection

Screenshot showing the location of the enabled "Hub SDK web access open" setting in the Flic Hub settings page of the Flic app. — Step 1. Enable SDK access. Check!

I run a Huginn instance on our household NAS. If you’ve not come across it before, Huginn is a bit like an open-source IFTTT: it’s got a steep learning curve, but it’s incredibly powerful for automation tasks. The first step, then, was to set up my Flic Hub LR to talk to Huginn.

Screenshot showing the Flic Hub SDK open in Firefox. Three modules are loaded: "IR Recorder", "UDP to IR Blaster", and "The Green", the latter of which is open. "The Green" shows JavaScript code to listen for 'buttonSingleOrDoubleClickOrHold' events then transmits them as HTTP POST requests to a 'webHook' URL. — Checking ‘Restart after crash’ seems to help ensure that the script re-launches after e.g. a power cut. Need the script?

This was pretty simple: all I had to do was switch on “Hub SDK web access open” for the hub using the Flic app, then use the the web SDK to add this script to the hub. Now whenever a button was clicked, double-clicked, or held down, my Huginn installation would receive a webhook ping.

Flow chart showing a Flic 2 button sending a Bluetooth 5 LE message to a Flic Hub LR, which sends a Webook notification to Huginn (depicted as a raven wearing a headset), which sends a message to an unidentified Internet Of Things device, "probably" over HTTPS. — Depending on what you have Huginn do “next”, this kind of set-up works completely independently of “the cloud”. (Your raven can fly into the clouds if you really want.)

For convenience, I have all button-presses sent to the same Webhook, and use Trigger Agents to differentiate between buttons and press-types. This means I can re-use functionality within Huginn, e.g. having both a button press and some other input trigger a particular action.

You’ve Got Mail!

By our front door, we have “in trays” for each of Ruth, JTA and I, as well as one for the bits of Three Rings‘ post that come to our house. Sometimes post sits in the in-trays for a long time because people don’t think to check them, or don’t know that something new’s been added.

I configured Huginn with a Trigger Agent to receive events from my webhook and filter down to just single clicks on specific buttons. The events emitted by these triggers are used to notify in-tray owners.

Annotated screenshot showing a Huginn Trigger Agent called "Flic Button C (Double) Details". Annotations show that: (1) "C" is the button name and that I label my buttons with letters. (2) "Double" is the kind of click I'm filtering for. (3) The event source for the trigger is a webhook called "Flic Buttons" whose URL I gave to my Flic Hub. (4) The event receiver for my Trigger Agent is called "Dan's In-Tray (Double) to Slack", which is a Slack Agent, but could easily be something more-sophisticated. (5) The first filter rule uses path: bdaddr, type: field==value, and a value equal to the MAC address of the button; this filters to events from only the specified button. (6) The second filter rule uses path: isDoubleClick, type: field==value, and value: true; this filters to events of type isDoubleClick only and not of types isSingleClick or isHold. — Once you’ve made three events for your first button, you can copy-paste from then on.

In my case, I’ve got pings being sent to mail recipients via Slack, but I could equally well be integrating to other (or additional) endpoints or even performing some conditional logic: e.g. if it’s during normal waking hours, send a Pushbullet notification to the recipient’s phone, otherwise send a message to an Arduino to turn on an LED strip along the top of the recipient’s in-tray.

I’m keeping it simple for now. I track three kinds of events (click = “post in your in-tray”, double-click = “I’ve cleared my in-tray”, hold = “parcel wouldn’t fit in your in-tray: look elsewhere for it”) and don’t do anything smarter than send notifications. But I think it’d be interesting to e.g. have a counter running so I could get a daily reminder (“There are 4 items in your in-tray.”) if I don’t touch them for a while, or something?

Remember the Milk!

Following the same principle, and with the hope that the Flic buttons are weatherproof enough to work in a covered outdoor area, I’ve fitted one… to the top of the box our milkman delivers our milk into!

Top of a reinforced polystyrene doorstep milk storage box, showing the round-topped handle. A metal file sits atop the box, about to be used to file down the handle. — The handle on the box was almost exactly the right size to stick a Flic button to! But it wasn’t flat enough until I took a file to it.

Most mornings, our milkman arrives by 7am, three times a week. But some mornings he’s later – sometimes as late as 10:30am, in extreme cases. If he comes during the school run the milk often gets forgotten until much later in the day, and with the current weather that puts it at risk of spoiling. Ironically, the box we use to help keep the milk cooler for longer on the doorstep works against us because it makes the freshly-delivered bottles less-visible.

Milk container, with a Flic 2 button attached to the handle of the lid and a laminated notice attached, reading: "Left milk? Press the button on the Milk Minder. It'll remind us to bring in the milk!" — Now that I had the technical infrastructure already in place, honestly the hardest part of this project was matching the font used in Milk & More‘s logo.

I’m yet to see if the milkman will play along and press the button when he drops off the milk, but if he does: we’re set! A second possible bonus is that the kids love doing anything that allows them to press a button at the end of it, so I’m optimistic they’ll be more-willing to add “bring in the milk” to their chore lists if they get to double-click the button to say it’s been done!

Future Plans

I’m still playing with ideas for the next round of buttons. Could I set something up to streamline my work status, so my colleagues know when I’m not to be disturbed, away from my desk, or similar? Is there anything I can do to simplify online tabletop roleplaying games, e.g. by giving myself a desktop “next combat turn” button?

Flic Infared Transceiver on the side of a bookcase, alongside an (only slighter smaller than it) 20p piece, for scale. — My Flic Hub is mounted behind a bookshelf in the living room, with only its infrared transceiver exposed. 20p for scale: we don’t keep a 20p piece stuck to the side of the bookcase all the time.

I’m quite excited by the fact that the Flic Hub can interact with an infrared transceiver, allowing it to control televisions and similar devices: I’d love to be able to use the volume controls on our media centre PC’s keyboard to control our TV’s soundbar: and because the Flic Hub can listen for UDP packets, I’m hopeful that something as simple as AutoHotkey can make this possible.

Or perhaps I could make a “universal remote” for our house, accessible as a mobile web app on our internal Intranet, for those occasions when you can’t even be bothered to stand up to pick up the remote from the other sofa. Or something that switched the TV back to the media centre’s AV input when consoles were powered-down, detected by their network activity? (Right now the TV automatically switches to the consoles when they’re powered-on, but not back again afterwards, and it bugs me!)

It feels like the only limit with these buttons is my imagination, and that’s awesome.