Push notifications from Raspberry Pi

Often it's useful to just receive information from a Raspberry Pi. Surely Yowsup could be nice, but you need a phone card and also it's not a simple system to use.

Setting and using Whatsapp with Yowsup can be a nightmare and sometimes it seems a bit unreliable. I do not know if it's a Yousup issue or maybe from how I use the libraries (but I found other Yowsup users with similar problems).

If you just need to receive information from the RPi, without sending them, the solution could be using push notifications. These are messages sent to your smart device. The device can be configured to inform you of the incoming message as soon as this is received.

I searched a lot for different ways to get info from my RPi. One of the best systems I found seems to be Pushover.

Launch Python script at boot

Sometimes we could need to start a Python script when Raspberry Pi boots up in a full autonomous way.

RPi could be really useful if used headless, without a direct user interaction (at least when starting the system), so if we created a script for a RPi that needs to be executed at startup, we also need a way to accomplish this task.

In this post I will describe a way to execute a Python script (but this works also for every other kind of software) when booting the RPi.