Telegram Bot with MicroPython

Motivation

In my project Mailbox IoT ESP 32 Project I needed a Telegram bot to relay the messages.

So here is a short tutorial

Create TG bot

1. Open Telegram
2. Search for @botfather
3. Start chat
4. Send /newbot
5. Pick a name
6. Pick a username (must be unique)
7. Receive credentials

Chat with your bot

Now you can search for your bot’s name and send a message

Python test Program

Telegram has a nice python package which you can pip install

pip install python-telegram-bot --upgrade

import telegram 
bot = telegram.Bot(token='<your_token>') 
if __name__ == '__main__': 
    print(bot.get_me()) 
    bot.send_message(chat_id="<your_chat_id>", text="Post ist da")

This program is just to used to test the connectivity of your bot.

Because we don’t have access to the telegram package inside the ESP / MicroPython environment we use urequests.

urequests

The telegram package isn’t available on the ESP32 / microPython, so we send our requests with the microPython port of the requests package called urequests.

Sending messages

import urequests
requests.get("https://api.telegram.org/bot<your_token>/sendMessage?text=hallo&chat_id=<your_chat_id>")

Lets clean up the code a bit:

try:
    import urequests as requests
except ModuleNotFoundError:
    import requests

TOKEN = "<your_token"
URL = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/"
CHAT_ID = "<your_chat_id"

def send_message(text, chat_id):
    url = f"{URL}sendMessage?text={text}&chat_id={chat_id}"
    response = requests.get(url)
    content = response.text
    return content

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(send_message("Your parcel arrived", CHAT_ID))

References

https://makeblock-micropython-api.readthedocs.io/en/latest/public_library/Third-party-libraries/urequests.html