rosswd / pushcap

Push notifications for data usage on the Huawei B593s-22 4G Router

pushcap

After my broadband provider decided to actually enforce its download cap and took my free credit, I decided I needed an automated way to get notifications of my data usage.

I use an unlocked Huawei B593s-22 4G/LTE Router to get my Internet access. Selenium and Chromedriver log me into the Router locally and grab my data usage, then send me a push notification. It does this once a day. I use Launchd and https://pushover.net/ to automate the process.

If you're going to use this yourself, know that I did no security testing. Your username and password could be sniffed over wifi I guess. See below for setup instructions.

This is for Mac OS X only.

setup

I assume you have python, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, pip and the Chrome Browser installed.

• Clone this repo
• Install Chromedriver via homebrew
  • brew install chromedriver
• Create a new environment using virtualenvwrapper
• mkvirtualenv <env>
• Install Python Dependencies for your version of Python
  • Python 3
    • pip install -r requirements.txt
  • Python 2
    • pip install requests python-dotenv
    • pip install selenium
• Create a new app on https://pushover.net/ and note your user and app keys
• Create a .env file with unquoted Environment Variables for
  • Router Username
  • Router Password
  • Router IP Address
  • Pushover Application Token
  • Pushover User Key
  • Pushover Message Title
• Test that your program works manually with
  • python app.py
• If you get this far move on to automating below

automating

You need two things to automate the notifications:

1. A bash shell script that calls your python program
2. A launchd plist file that calls your shell script

1. bash shell script

Find the path to the virtualenv environment you created above. You’re looking for the path to your python executable for that environment. Mine is ~/Envs/pcap/bin/python3.6 pcap is my environment.

Create a bash script (script.sh) like so:

#!/bin/bash
$HOME/Envs/pcap/bin/python3.6 $HOME/Sites/python/pushcap/app.py

Make your script executable:

chmod +x script.sh

Test your script manually:

./script.sh

2. launchd plist file

You need to create a plist file called something like com.me.pushcap.plist and store it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents

To manage the loading and unloading of plist files you can use launchctl:

• launchctl load com.me.pushcap.plist
• launchctl unload com.me.pushcap.plist
• launchctl list | grep 'me'

We will use 6 parameters or keys in our plist file:

1. Label
2. Program
3. RunAtLoad
4. StandardErrorPath
5. StandardOutPath
6. StartCalendarInterval

Copy one of the files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents - the com.google.keystone.agent.plist for example. Remove everything inside the <dict> tag and save the file as com.me.pushcap.plist

Add the following inside the <dict> tag block:

<key>Label</key>
<string>com.me.pushcap</string>
<key>Program</key>
<string>/Users/me/Sites/python/pushcap/script.sh</string>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/tmp/pushcap.err</string>
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/tmp/pushcap.out</string>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
    <key>Hour</key>
    <integer>21</integer>
    <key>Minute</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
</dict>

Load the plist file with launchctl and check that it returns a 0 when you list the process:

• launchctl load com.me.pushcap.plist
• launchctl list | grep 'me'

Verify that you are receiving push notifications from Pushover.

If you find launchd hard to use, lunchy makes running launchd commands a lot simpler.