Charly's Column – Outsmarting WhatsApp

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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.

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