Detecting motion with RPi

Using OpenCV library and few lines of Python code it's easy to create a simple motion detection with a Raspberry Pi.

This could be accomplished with other methods, like using a PIR sensor, but sometimes you just want to use a webcam without adding further hardware.

For this post I'm using my Sphaera configuration. This means that the video from a PiCamera is available as a web stream, but it would be easy to get your video frames from different sources...

Using Telegram with Raspberry Pi

Until few months ago to communicate with my Raspberry Pi I used Yowsup that is able to connect to the Whatsapp servers.

Unfortunately this method has several issues that made me choose something different... First of all the need of a sim card or at least a phone number not used for other Whatsapp connections, the frequent changes on the Whatsapp protocol and so to the Yowsup libraries that force you to always check for them and eventually update the software and your scripts also on the RPi and least but not last the fact that Whatsapp do not like that their servers are used with a software that is not their messenger!

There are several different solutions to communicate with a RPi. One that I'm using is Pushover, but it's just a one way system (from RPi to the smartphone). It works quite well if you just need text notifications, but if you need something really like Whatsapp the solution could be Telegram.

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.