Already told this story as a tweet responding to the above, but longer stories are always fun.
I set up a RPI Zero with a webcam to monitor my front door for potential visiters. I wanted to have it text me any time someone was at the door. Originally I tried to use the text-email gateway for my provider, but sending emails from the RPI just ended up looking like spam, and I didn't want to bother setting up some email relay, so I looked into using Twilio. Thankfully they have a nice little script you can use to text a given number, you just have to supply your API key and get a Twilio number to text from. The software I was using, motion, also has a bunch of nifty hooks, including one for when it detects an "event" of motion, the definition of which you can tune. Awesome! So, plug in the script to that, restart motion, and start waving my hand in front of the camera!
I then proceeded to get about 500 texts in the span of about a minute.
Eventually, after shutting everything down, I figured out what I did wrong. I had put the script into the on_motion hook, instead of the on_motion_event hook. The former hook is if you want to trigger something any time a frame of motion is detected. Wave your hand in front of that a bunch, and you're bound to trigger that hook many times. So not only did I manage to flood my phone with texts, but I also burnt through a good amount of Twilio trial credits.
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Already told this story as a tweet responding to the above, but longer stories are always fun.
I set up a RPI Zero with a webcam to monitor my front door for potential visiters. I wanted to have it text me any time someone was at the door. Originally I tried to use the text-email gateway for my provider, but sending emails from the RPI just ended up looking like spam, and I didn't want to bother setting up some email relay, so I looked into using Twilio. Thankfully they have a nice little script you can use to text a given number, you just have to supply your API key and get a Twilio number to text from. The software I was using,
motion, also has a bunch of nifty hooks, including one for when it detects an "event" of motion, the definition of which you can tune. Awesome! So, plug in the script to that, restartmotion, and start waving my hand in front of the camera!I then proceeded to get about 500 texts in the span of about a minute.
Eventually, after shutting everything down, I figured out what I did wrong. I had put the script into the
on_motionhook, instead of theon_motion_eventhook. The former hook is if you want to trigger something any time a frame of motion is detected. Wave your hand in front of that a bunch, and you're bound to trigger that hook many times. So not only did I manage to flood my phone with texts, but I also burnt through a good amount of Twilio trial credits.