Why a home needs a messenger
Every smart home app is another icon, another login, another interface the whole family has to learn. We took a different route: the home writes to its owner where they already spend their time — in Telegram. And it doesn't just write: the same bot controls the home.
Notifications that understand context
A simple example from a real project — a leak sensor:
⚠️ Leak detected! 📍 Location: guest bedroom bathroom
Sounds basic. But here's the detail separating a well-designed system from an off-the-shelf alarm: the home has a cleaning mode. When floors are being washed, leak sensors inevitably trip on the water — and a naive system would flood the owner with false alarms. Here, the notification is automatically suppressed while cleaning mode is active. Floors washed — no alarms. And a real leak at night still never slips through.
Every notification is rule-driven: which value triggers it, what to say when the problem appears — and what to say when it clears:
✅ Leak resolved.
Buttons right inside the notification
The bot attaches action buttons to alerts. A leak notification arrives — and right there in the chat you can shut off the water. The alarm goes off — a "Disarm" button sits directly under the message. No opening an app, no hunting for the right screen: the action lives next to the news about the problem.
A full control menu
Beyond reacting to events, the bot has a multi-page menu — like a mini-app inside Telegram:
- System status by section: climate, lighting, boiler room, ventilation
- Device control straight from the chat
- Page navigation — "Boiler room", "Ground floor", "Outdoors" — each with its own buttons
For the family it means: nobody has to learn a special app. If you can use Telegram, you can run the home.
Security
The bot only responds to pre-authorised users — the list is set in configuration. To everyone else the bot simply doesn't exist: it never replies to strangers and never leaks information about the home.
The technical side
The bot runs locally on the automation server and talks to the system over MQTT — the same language the home's devices use among themselves. It's a thin layer: if Telegram is unreachable, the home keeps running as if nothing happened — the messenger is a window into the system, not its brain.
We released this module as open source — the code and documentation are on our GitHub. We believe in transparency: you can see exactly how the things we install in your home are built.
tj-mqtt-telegram on GitHub