Internet Of Things Blog

Dave Hunt ‘s been at it again. Here’s his latest: a home-made smartphone based around a Raspberry Pi. It’s smaller than many of the phones I’ve owned, and it’s cheaper than the phone that’s currently in my pocket, with a parts list coming in at only $158. The PiPhone is built entirely from off-the-shelf kit, so there’s no soldering required, and no fiddly electronics work. I’ll let Dave introduce it to you. PiPhone: A DIY Raspberry Pi Cellphone

The Internet of Things  makes it easy for us to monitor our homes. Today I’m taking that concept one step further—getting our homes to report back to us.  In early March, I wrote about  using Raspberry Pi to quantify my fish tank —in short, I taught the $35 single-board computer to monitor the temperature of my home aquarium no matter where I was in the apartment. Of course, the limitations of this project were clear: I could only keep tabs on the tank while on my home network. What if I want my fish to text me when it needs my assistance?  The problem, until now, was that getting the Raspberry Pi to initiate communication was hard. I experimented with a  Node.js receiving application, and contemplated buying a server from which to run it (since my Bluehost server space doesn’t support a Node installation). The other way to get the Raspberry Pi to talk to me was to teach it to text my phone. There are also  many ways to achieve SMS support in Python , Pi’s primary language,