I’m working on a home automation project using Raspberry Pi and want to control it through Telegram. My Python skills are decent and I know my way around the Pi, but I’m stuck on the Telegram integration part.
So far I’ve managed to create the bot and get my API token. I can successfully push notifications to my Telegram chat, but I can’t figure out how to make the bot listen for my commands and respond to them.
What I’m trying to achieve is something like having the bot wait for my text messages and use them as input data, similar to how user_input = input("Enter command: ") works in regular Python scripts, but instead it should capture whatever I type in the Telegram chat.
Since this is just for personal use, I’m hardcoding my chat ID directly. Can someone point me in the right direction for handling incoming messages? Any code examples would be really appreciated!
yup, polling is like super simple for small stuff. just call getUpdates to get the messages that come in. then check out the message field for any commands you wanna use. totally works for what u need!
Had the exact same problem with my Pi automation last year. You’re missing a message loop that constantly checks for new messages. Use the requests library to hit Telegram’s getUpdates method in a while loop, then parse the JSON for incoming messages. Each update has an update_id - track the highest one you’ve processed and use it as the offset parameter next time so you don’t process duplicates. When a message comes in, grab the text and match it against your command keywords, then run the automation function. Make sure to handle exceptions since network calls fail, and throw in some sleep time between API calls or you’ll hit rate limits.
The telegram.ext library beats raw API calls hands down. Just set up handlers that listen for specific commands or message types. Install python-telegram-bot, create an Updater with your bot token, and add CommandHandler or MessageHandler instances. These handlers are callback functions that fire when users send matching messages. For basic text commands, use MessageHandler with Filters.text - it’ll grab all text messages and send them to your function where you parse content and run your automation tasks. The library handles polling and message processing automatically, so you just write the logic for your home automation responses.