LED notifications for Gmail, Twitter and Facebook

Today I decided to learn some Python with my Raspberry Pi.
I already have an Ambilight/Boblight system hooked up to my Raspberry Pi (you can read about it here), essentially it’s a series of LEDs mounted on the edge of my TV which change colour in sync with the video playing on the Raspberry Pi/TV.

I decided to try and make these LEDs flash whenever I receive an email. It was actually pretty easy so I set it up to also flash when I get Facebook notifications or mentions on Twitter.

It works by reading RSS feeds at a set interval and checking if there have been any changes since it last checked.

It seems to work, it flashes a different colour for each type of notification I receive so I’m happy with that. I doubt I will actually use this code as my phone already does this, but it was a bit of fun and I’ve learnt some Python in the process.

With some modifications, you could get the code to turn on a single LED connected to the Pi’s GPIO, play a sound, boil the kettle or whatever else you can think of!

You could also combine the Gmail portion of code with any of the triggers at If This Then That. So you could change the colour of your LEDs depending on the weather forecast, or an event in your Google Calendar or…

If you want to give it a go you will need to install feedparser, if you haven’t done so already:

sudo pip install feedparser

My dodgy looking Python script:

import feedparser, time, sys, os
#variables you need to set
user = "xxx"    #gmail username
passw = "xxx"   #gmail password
twUser = "@_nadnerb"  #twitter username
interval = 900   #seconds between checking for updates
numFlashes = 3   #number of LED flashes

#these are the RSS URLs to parse
gmailURL = "https://" + user + ":" + passw +"@mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"
twURL = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q="+twUser
fbURL = "http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
#replace the above FB link with your personal FB RSS feed URL which you will find here:
#https://www.facebook.com/notifications

# these are the colours you want to flash when you get an update
flashRed = "boblight-constant -p 127 -o value=1 FF0000 -f > /dev/null"
flashGreen= "boblight-constant -p 127 -o value=1 00FF00 -f > /dev/null"
flashBlue = "boblight-constant -p 127 -o value=1 0088FF -f > /dev/null"
killBoblight = "kill $(ps aux | grep '[b]oblight-constant' | awk '{print $2}'  | sed '$!d') > /dev/null" # command which kills the most recent boblight-constant instance

#get the initial values which we check against later
no_of_emails = int(feedparser.parse(gmailURL)["feed"]["fullcount"]) #parse the gmail feed to get number of unread emails
fbFeed = feedparser.parse(fbURL)["channel"] #parse the fb feed
twFeed = feedparser.parse(twURL)["feed"] #parse the tw feed
twUpdated = twFeed.updated # extract the date/time of the last update
fbUpdated = fbFeed.updated # extract the date/time of the last update

#start a loop
while True:

####### GMAIL #########
	no_of_emails_new = int(feedparser.parse(gmailURL)["feed"]["fullcount"])
	if no_of_emails_new > no_of_emails:
		for i in range(numFlashes):
			os.system(flashRed)
			os.system(killBoblight)
		#end for
		no_of_emails = no_of_emails_new #reset the count as we only want 1 email alert
	#end if
	
####### TWITTER #########	
	twUpdated_new = feedparser.parse(twURL)["feed"]
	if twUpdated_new.updated > twUpdated: #checks if RSS feed has been updated
		for i in range(numFlashes):
			os.system(flashGreen)
			os.system(killBoblight) 
		#end for 
		twUpdated = twUpdated_new.updated 
	#end if
	
####### FACEBOOK #########
	fbFeed_new = feedparser.parse(fbURL)["channel"]
	if fbFeed_new.updated > fbUpdated: #checks if RSS feed has been updated
		for i in range(numFlashes):
			os.system(flashBlue)
			os.system(killBoblight)
		#end for
		fbUpdated = fbFeed_new.updated
	#end if

	time.sleep(interval)