Charly's Column – Outsmarting WhatsApp

Berry Service

Article from Issue 193/2016
Author(s):

Sys admin Charly likes to keep up with the state of his domestic strawberry plants, so he has outsmarted WhatsApp to allow status messages to be sent through the service from a PC or Raspberry Pi.

When it comes to domestic events, I use WhatsApp to keep on top: A motion detector in the bird and hedgehog house, the status of the garden irrigation system, doorbell, water level in the aquarium, and much more. The tool that sends me the message is Yowsup [1], and it's easy to install:

wget https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd yowsup-master/
./setup.py install

Yowsup makes the WhatsApp API believe it is running on cellphone. You need a SIM card that is not yet registered with WhatsApp for the login process. I used a free prepaid card for that purpose. "Free" here means that there is no monthly base charge or contract but only pay-per-call. Some mobile service providers have such SIM cards on offer.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Meow, Meow

    To impress his WhatsApp friends, Mike Schilli builds a chatbot in Go that contacts OpenAI on demand and provides answers.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Miniflux

    Sys admin Charly Kühnast typically follows 40 to 50 RSS feeds using Tiny Tiny RSS on his own server. Now, the good times spent with the faithful Tiny are coming to an end. Read on to discover the whole story.

    more »
  • guiscrcpy

    With guiscrcpy graphical user interface and the scrcpy command-line tool, you can control your smartphone from the comfort of your Linux desktop and even record what you're doing onscreen.

    more »
  • Charly’s Column: Raspberry Pi

    It’s probably not a coincidence that a number of people want to write about the muchlauded Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and our regular columnist Charly isn’t going to blow raspberries.

    more »
  • Charly’s Column: S3QL

    Sys admin Charly has been an enthusiastic amateur photographer for many years. Recently, he started worrying about something happening to his rapidly expanding photo collection. Can the cloud save the day?

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source