There are lots of reasons to keep track of your wallets. For example, to make sure your paper wallet is safe, to keep control of a shared wallet or to know if you have received any donation for your project (or your writings at read.cash).
Now there's one way to make it possible without depending on any 3rd party service or doing it manually, you just need a $10 (or less) NodeMCU board. Any ESP8266 board could work, but I only have a NodeMCU V3 board to test it.
What is the Bitcoin Cash Watchdog?
The BCH Watchdog is a little program that runs on any ESP8266 board. It constantly keep track of the balance of a list of addresses given by the user. If any change in the balance is detected, you will get an alert via Telegram in your computer, smartphone or laptop!
But the purpose is not just that. I try to show how the Bitcoin Cash blockchain can easily interact with IoT devices thanks to the Bitcoin.com REST API. You can make any project you want, like expending machines, with cheap hardware and little coding skills (like myself).
Disclaimer: this is just beta software.
How to set up the Bitcoin Cash Watchdog
First, download the Arduino IDE and install the ESP8266-compatible boards. Here's a quick tutorial: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/how-to-install-esp8266-board-arduino-ide/
Then, install the required libraries: ArduinoJSON and uTLGBotLib, both available at the Library Manager of Arduino IDE.
Make a Telegram bot to interact with the watchdog. Simply use the BotFather, set a name and keep your token. More info here: https://core.telegram.org/bots#6-botfather
Download the Watchdog, which is just a little .ino file: https://github.com/libercash/BCH_Watchdog/
Open the .ino file with the Arduino IDE, and change:
Addresses: put the addresses you want to track.
WiFi parameters: your WiFi SSID and password
Bot token: the token you got from the Bot Father.
Connect you ESP8266 board and upload the watchdog.
Send any message to the bot chat to start the watchdog. You're done!
Advantages
This is an open source project, you can customize it and do whatever you want. The Arduino community is huge and full of helpful people. The bot does not store any private key, so no risk of losing funds, and detects 0-conf transactions so you will get an early alert. And Telegram is available in lots of platforms, you you can get an alert wherever you are.
To Do
If I have enough free time, I want to implement HTTPS (incompatible with the Telegram library I'm using for Arduino) and make the bot interactive to add new addresses using Telegram. If anyone has any idea regarding BCH and Arduino I could try to help, despite this is my first BCH project and I barely have coding skills.
Your articles are so useful. And I started reading it all. Thank you for all the informations.@norphine