I’ve been struggling to finish a side project for a while, but I’ve finally actually finished something, so I thought I’d write it up.

Ethan and I are in the process of adopting a baby, and we’re at the point in the process where we can get a phone call basically at any time saying our baby is being born and we need to travel to some hospital anywhere in the United States to pick them up. Like, right now.

This is stressful, and one of the things that was stressing me out was telling everyone what was going on in that moment. We needed to tell my boss I was not going to be in work, we needed to tell our friends that were going to be taking care of our house and dog that we were leaving, and we needed to tell our families that things were in motion and we’d be in touch soon. That’s a lot of texting and calling when you’re trying to arrange travel and lodgings and get out the door.

Fortunately, computers.

We decided we wanted a button we could slam that would just… tell everyone for us. No texting, no calling, just smacking a button in the garage as we got in the car. This seemed doable! A button that, when pushed, calls a program, which contacts any of the very-usable APIs for communicating with our loved ones, and sends a message on our behalf. This seemed like a thing I could do in, like, a night.

For once, my instincts about how long a project would take to build were mostly right. Getting programmatic access to all these communication methods took a little longer, just because we’re not administrators for all the communication methods we use, and so couldn’t grant ourselves API access. Which meant waiting for and convincing other people to give us access.

We used a random USB button we found on Amazon to be the push button. It doesn’t have mounting hardware, so we just screwed right through the plastic to affix it to our garage wall. YOLO.

We used a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with a PoE hat to plug the button into and run the program. Probably overkill, but whatever. When we bought our house, the first thing we did upon getting inside was pay people to run CAT-6 ethernet all over it for us, and fortunately had thought to have them put an ethernet port in the garage. Right where we wanted the button, coincidentally! The PoE hat meant we could just plug the Raspberry Pi into the ethernet port and didn’t need to worry about power at all. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary. But I like the one cable setup. Putting the Raspberry Pi in a SecurePi case let us protect it and mount it securely on the wall next to the button.

Then I wrote some software. It’s just a Go binary that, when called, calls the Slack, Discord, Twilio, and Matrix APIs to send the messages you specified. I used HCL for the configuration file to specify the messages you want sent, and I stored the credentials for all these services in a Vault cluster we already had running on our home network.

The last bit to do was wire the program up to run when the button is pushed. inputexec is a neat little utility for that, though it hasn’t been updated in a while. It lets you listen for keypress events from a specific input device, then execute a program when they happen. Exactly what I wanted! I configured the button (it has a hardware pin-based configuration inside) to send F12 when it’s pushed, and set up inputexec to run my Go binary when F12 is pushed. The code for inputexec is a little out of date, so to get it working with the Python version that ships with Raspberry Pi OS I had to modify it a little bit, but it was only two lines and didn’t derail me too much.

Put it all together, and it’s working exactly how we want. Now we know we’re not going to need to be typing on our phones while running around the house and packing things up, frantically searching our brains for who we need to contact and what we need to tell them. We can just smack a button and go.