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.
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...