Coming back from PyCon 2013, I was looking for interesting Raspberry Pi project ideas that would attract the attention of both non-programming students and those with more experience. I was averaging one Raspberry Python class each month at my hackerspace, MakerBar.
I decided that the project should relate to Mother’s day and have something my students could take home or perhaps even give to their Mom as a nifty gift. I had a few new services in my mind including some cloud APIs like Stormcloud and Plivo which I ended up using for my Raspberry Pi project.
So I decided to teach my students how to access a web API and settled on the Call Mom button—a Raspberry Pi board with a set of four buttons connected via Plivo, which gives you not only the titular Call Mom button, but also a Call Dad button—just to be fair with Dads—a “Text Mom I love her” button, and a spare button which students could use however they want.
With this Raspberry Pi project, I had won Twitter contest sponsored by Plivo at PyCon and my students had a great time building their own buttons in class. Now let me share how I built Call Mom using Raspberry Pi and Plivo.
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