Adding Email

Having the picam on a hanger roof is great, except.....

when it starts  to go wrong, I cant see what the issue is... 

Also, we are getting intermittent periods of 'no updates', and cant tell if these are because the husbos internet is down, the picam is sick, power cut etc etc...

So I thought it would be good if the picam sent a daily email, with a log file of its attempts during the day, so we can at least get an idea of what problems its seeing..

Also, because I'm using DHCP, its somewhat tricky to connect to the picam on the local wlan, as I dont know the ip.. So it would be good if it sent an email on startup telling me its new ip address..

To do this needs email, ( not installed by default ), and it would be good if it could use gmail, rather than our ISP email server... It was a lot easier to get working than I thought !

I followed this guide..

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=32077

and this

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-use-gmail-as-a-smarthost.html

then installed Mutt, so I could send attachments..

Tho actually, I’ve now found I can  stick my attachments in as the body of the email.

 

If you don’t fancy the links, I think the exact commands and order was..

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

sudo apt-get install mutt

then configure the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file to your gmail settings,

( I created a new gmail account for this )

just these bits..

AuthUser=your.account@gmail.com

AuthPass=Your-Gmail-Password

And away you go !

You can then send emails from cmd line and hence from a bash script..

Either using ssmtp

echo "this is a test" | ssmtp -s Subject schwabinger@blabla.de

or mutt

echo "Picam1 logfiles “ | mutt -a "/home/pi/picam1.log" -s "picam1 logfiles "$taken -- toby@home.com

the ‘echo’ bit is what appears in the body of the email

the –a bit is to add an attachment

the –s is the subject….

Here’s the script to do from a cronjob etc…

#!/bin/bash

# script to email logfiles to toby

# then delete the logfiles to save space

# get the single digit of time, ie 0-9 for file extension

day=`date "+%a"`

DMY=`date "+%x"`

now=`date "+%R"`

taken=$day"_"$DMY"_"$now

gettime=`date "+%M"`

{

cat /home/pi/picam1.log

} | mutt -a "/home/pi/picam1.log" -s "picam1 logfiles "$taken -- toby@home.com

rm -f /home/pi/picam1.log