Motion-Tracking with Viber's Chatbot Platform

We love to hack cool projects from different fields. This week, we hosted Will Archer Arentz, from Rakuten Institute of Technology, who recently created his own smart home using Viber.

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In this post, we’ll showcase a high-level plan for how you can build a motion tracker and have alerts sent to you through Viber’s chatbot platform.

System design

We will use simple/low power microcontroller to communicate Viber’s chatbot platform every time the motion sensor (PIR) detects a movement.

Materials

• Arduino IDE for the ESP8266 microcontroller (with built in WiFi) that can be acquired very inexpensively from here.
• Motion Sensor Module. We got ours from here.
• We will use Viber’s Python bot API as means of communication to the platform.

Putting it all together

We will connect the microcontroller and the motion sensor by 3 wires: 5V, GND, PIR-OUT -> NodeMCU PIN 2.

See the microcontroller code below:

Result

Finally, we should have our motion detector up and working. It will look something like this:

Possible next steps?

We might consider utilizing the sun as a power source for a more sustainable energy source. We are also aware of the potential to enhance this bot’s capabilities, as it has the ability to manage individual rooms, in addition to the entire home. The bot can also monitor the environment that it supervises - providing data about outside temperature, light and power.

Your project

If you have an interesting project you’d like to share with the Viber developer community, please fill out this form.