Using whatsapp for home automation - Something real

Last time we saw how to start interpreting whatsapp messages using a simple parser written in Python.

What we did was implementing just a small interaction with our RPi and nothing more. Surely it wasn't a real home automation.

Now it's time to try something closer to that definition. I will keep quite simple, but the concepts are valid for more complex situations too.

Anyway I will just take into account only low-level automation. What I mean is that communication protocols like X10, 1-wire, Modbus, ZigBee and so on will not be used, at least for now.

Maybe in a future I could write a post about these, but do not take this as a fact. It just could happen one day...

Using whatsapp for home automation - The parser

Last time we saw how to install Yowsup on our Raspberry Pi and use the python script yowsup-cli to send and receive messages.

Now it's time to use it for something useful.

With the new Yowsup 2 you cannot use yowsup-cli to send and receive the messages. This is both a good and a bad news. The bad part is that you need to create the classes as described in the author's site, or to modify the existing demos.
The good part is that we will have much more control over the whole system we are creating and everything will be integrated in the script, without the need to execute something external.