Overview
The Hacker School space for our batch had two restrooms: one attached to the main work area, and one downstairs. We thought it would nice to know if the bathroom is occupied before taking the time to walk down.
Our project makes it possible to check the bathroom status by phone or text message.
Bathroom occupancy status is determined using a light sensor attached to a Raspberry Pi. If the lights are on in the bathroom, we assume that the bathroom is occupied.
We created a Heroku–hosted web application that accepts periodic bathroom state updates from the Raspberry Pi and handles incoming requests from Twilio. When a user calls or texts the Twilio phone number, Twilio sends a request to the web app, which responds with an appropriate message to be spoken or texted to the user.
In addition to the voice/SMS interface, @gelstudios created a nice web interface for the project.
Server
Twilio
Twilio is a web–based service for sending and receiving phone calls and SMS text messages. It provides an easy–to–use API accessible via HTTP and a convenient Python package. A free trial of the service is available (which inserts small nag notices into outgoing messages). We used the Twilio Python Quickstart Tutorials as our introduction.
Heroku
Heroku is a service that provides a complete, integrated stack for hosting web applications with a range of choices in language, framework, web server and data store. We created the server application for the project in Python using the Flask microframework. The Heroku Dev Center article Getting Started with Python on Heroku is a good walkthrough for setting up Flask on Heroku.
Server Code
Full source for the web application can be found at github.com/qqrs/twilio-light-sensor-server/blob/master/run.py.
The /twilio/voice and /twilio/text routes handle requests from Twilio. When a user calls or sends an SMS message to the phone number assigned to our account, Twilio is configured so that it will make an HTTP POST request to these routes. When the server receives the request from Twilio, it generates an appropriate message indicating the status of the bathroom. The message is returned to Twilio in the HTTP response and is sent to the user as either audio (by text–to–speech) or as an SMS message.
The /update route accepts sensor state updates from the remote sensor via HTTP POST. Each request includes sensor_id and sensor_val parameters to identify the sensor and report the current value.
For more detail: Voice– and SMS–Enabled Light Sensor Using Raspberry Pi and Twilio
