Published October 18, 2016 © GPL3+

Raspberry Pi Texting Intruder Alarm!

Make your raspberry pi text you if it senses an intruder in a set amount of time using a simple PIR sensor and internet connection!

BeginnerFull instructions provided1 hour10,280

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

PIR Motion Sensor (generic)

Jumper wires (generic)

Software apps and online services

Python IDLE (on Raspberry Pi)

Story

In this project you will be able to create a fully functioning alarm system. It alerts you via text message whenever the sensor gets tripped. Let's look at what you need to put in the code.

First you will need your phone "e-mail" address. Carriers have a system in which someone can text you via email. Here is a list of some of the most common carriers' phone addresses:

AT&T: number@txt.att.net for a normal text message (SMS), or number@mms.att.net for a multimedia message (MMS)

Verizon: number@vtext.com for both SMS and MMS messages

Sprint PCS: number@messaging.sprintpcs.com for both SMS and MMS messages

T-Mobile: number@tmomail.net for both SMS and MMS messages

Virgin Mobile: number@vmobl.com for both SMS and MMS messages

Just replace the TO portion with your phone address. Now onto the Gmail user portion. The "GMAIL_USER" is going to be your Gmail account email address. Then put in for "PASS" your password. If you want to be more secure, you can set up an application-specific password in your Google Account Settings. Now load the code into your Raspberry Pi and enter: "sudo python the/file/location". That's it! Now you can have a cheap security system in under 30 minutes! If you're feeling extra ambitious, change the code to where it takes a picture with the Pi-Cam. I would really like to see what can be done with that. Thanks!

Code

The Raspberry Pi Code

import time
import smtplib
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

TO= "your phone # as a carrier email address: 'phone#@txt.att.net' for \ example" #all of the credentials
GMAIL_USER="your GMAIL account email address"
PASS= 'your account password'

SUBJECT = 'Alert!'
TEXT = 'Your Raspberry Pi detected an intruder!'

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(4,GPIO.IN)

def send_mail(): #the texting portion
    print "Sending text"
    server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:587')
    server.starttls()
    server.login(GMAIL_USER,PASS)
    header = 'To: ' + TO + '\n' + 'From: ' + GMAIL_USER
    header = header + '\n' + 'Subject: ' + SUBJECT + '\n'
    print header
    msg = header + '\n' + TEXT + '\n\n'
    server.sendmail(GMAIL_USER,TO,msg)
    server.quit()
    time.sleep(1)
    print "Text sent"

while True:
    if GPIO.input(4)==1: #trigger if sensor has detected something
        send_mail()
        time.sleep(60*2) #Sleep for 2 minutes
    else:
        time.sleep(5) #check every 5 seconds