Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Overview of this book

This book is for all mischievous Raspberry Pi owners who’d like to see their computer transform into a neat spy gadget to be used in a series of practical pranks and projects. No previous skills are required to follow along, and if you’re completely new to Linux, you’ll pick up much of the basics for free. We’ll help you set up your Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 and guide you through a number of pranks and secret agent techniques that are so inconspicuous yet high on mischief. You’ll learn how to configure your operating system for maximum mischief and start exploring audio, video, or Wi-Fi techniques. We’ll show you how to record, listen, or talk to people from a distance and how to set up your own phone network. Then, you’ll plug in your webcam and set up a motion detector with an alarm and find out what the other computers on your Wi-Fi network are up to. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, we’ll combine them with a battery pack and GPS for the ultimate off-road spy kit.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Sending alerts to your phone using SMS


We saw in Chapter 5, Taking Your Pi Off-road, how to send e-mails from the Raspberry Pi so that we can pick them up on our smartphone. But what if we're in an area where we can't get a good mobile Internet signal? All of our elaborate work to protect our things or get status updates from the field goes to waste because we don't get alerted in time.

SMS (Simple Messaging Service)—or text messaging—actually uses the mobile voice channel to deliver the message to your handset rather than the mobile Internet channel, so you're likely to receive your message in areas of poor reception and where there is no data service.

SMS gateway

Fortunately, sending a text message from our Pi can be as easy as making a URL request to a server if we choose an SMS gateway provider with a good API, such as BulkSMS. You can sign up for a UK account at http://www.bulksms.com/countries/u/united-kingdom, and just about any other country athttp://www.bulksms.com. They have good...