Where’s my Pi? pifind – locate your missing raspberry pi

Linux usage, python programming, raspberry pi Add comments

Aug 102012

pifind.py

A week or two ago, the illustrious Jim Manley ran a Raspberry Jam – a meeting of people interested in the Pi. Unfortunately someone walked off with his Raspberry Pi. A bunch of us were chewing over ideas, on the Raspberry Pi forums, for how to add security features to make it possible to locate a stolen Pi.

The whole thing reminded me of a fabulous book I used to love as a kid: The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry
Except the pies in the book were cherry, not raspberry.

Someone else (rurwin) suggested getting your Pi to ‘call home’ by email using a Googlemail or gmail account.

I decided it would be a fun little programming project to have a crack at this. I’ve been learning Python and thought this would be worthwhile. Actually it was. It taught me several new things I didn’t know how to do before…

how to query cpu and network data in linux
how to call an external process and use the result in python
how to send an email in python
how to interface to googlemail

…and also, AndrewS gave me some good programming style tips to clean it up. 8-)

So here’s the code. Feel free to use it, improve it customise it and change it. I take no responsibility for how you use it or what happens.

#!/usr/bin/env python2.7 import smtplib, string, subprocess


# Settings

fromaddr = 'yourgoogleaccount@googlemail.com'

toaddr  = 'youremailaddress@somedomain.com'  
# Googlemail login details

username = 'type your googlemail username here'

password = 'type your googlemail password here'  
output_if = subprocess.Popen(['ifconfig'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

output_cpu = open('/proc/cpuinfo', 'r').read()
BODY = string.join((

        "From: %s" % fromaddr,

        "To: %s" % toaddr,

        "Subject: Your RasPi just booted",

        "",

        output_if,

        output_cpu,

        ), "\r\n")

# send the email server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:587') server.starttls() server.login(username,password) server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddr, BODY) server.quit()

If you are likely to expose your Pi to other people, it would be a good idea to set up a dedicated googlemail account just for this because if your Pi is stolen, the perp will potentially have access to the googlemail password.

What this program does is, it runs the equivalent of these two command line commands and then emails the output to an email account of your choice…

ifconfig
cat /proc/cpuinfo

ifconfig gives output of mac address, network connections with internal IP addresses and general information about the network status of ethernet, wifi and local loopback connections.

cat /proc/cpuinfo gives you serial number and other cpu related information.

This is what the output looks like…

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:47:eb:5b:f3:32 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 80:3f:03:42:97:c4 inet addr:192.168.2.125 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:105 errors:0 dropped:166 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:11 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:10146 (9.9 KiB) TX bytes:1974 (1.9 KiB) Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l) BogoMIPS : 898.66 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xb76 CPU revision : 7
Hardware : BCM2708 Revision : 0002 Serial : 00000000527af636

And in the email header you have the IP address of the internet connection the Pi is connected to. The one inside the ([ ]). Obviously I have changed mine for security reasons.

Received: from [127.0.1.1] ([174.247.162.104]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id h42sm4503472eem.5.2012.08.09.08.49.44 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:49:45 -0700 (PDT)

Installation

This is very simple as it’s just a python script. If you want it to run automatically on startup, edit /etc/rc.local

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

And add this line just above the end where it says exit 0
python /home/pi/pifind.py

Download and unzip the file

Either click here pifind.py.gz

or, from /home/pi

wget https://raspi.tv/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/pifind.py.gz

then

gunzip pifind.py.gz

Then pifind.py should be in your /home/pi folder, then

sudo chmod 755 /home/pi/pifind.py

Edit pifind.py to insert your own google account username and password and your from and to addresses.
nano /home/pi/pifind.py

the values you need to change are in green

Also useful if you want to know the local IP address

I have found this quite useful for finding the IP address on my system when I am running headless (no screen). It sends me the IP address every time I boot up the Pi.

You can run it any time you like

It doesn’t have to be done only at startup. If you want to run the script at any time just type…

python /home/pi/pifind.py

or if youre already in /home/pi, simply…
python pifind.py

Sources

I got snippets of code from the following sources…
The google emailing code came from here
The BODY bit came from here

Hope this is useful and educational for you. It certainly was for me. ;)

18 Responses to “Where’s my Pi? pifind – locate your missing raspberry pi”

dsbaars says:

August 28, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Are you aware of the open-source Prey Project, it’s open source, has some nice features, runs “stealth” and you don’t need a dedicated Gmail account.
Of course you will also need to glue the SD-card in your RPi for obvious reasons ;)

Reply
- alex says:
  
  August 29, 2012 at 9:02 pm
  
  Hadn’t heard of that one. Looks good for phones and laptops, but as you said – so easy to remove the SD card, it’s less useful for the Pi.
  
  Reply
manuti says:

September 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm

Thanks, it’s just I’am looking for.

Reply
- alex says:
  
  September 11, 2012 at 4:49 pm
  
  You’re welcome. Hope it helps. If you have two level login on Google, you will need to use an application specific password, but best idea would be a dedicated gmail account just for this.
  
  Reply
any says:

September 12, 2012 at 9:45 pm

Hi,

i get an error:

File “email.py”, line 2
import smtplib, string, subprocess
^
IndentationError: unexpected indent

any idea ?

Reply
- alex says:
  
  September 12, 2012 at 10:24 pm
  
  That’s a weird one. How did you get hold of the file? Has a space slipped into line 2 accidentally?
  
  Reply
  - any says:
    
    September 12, 2012 at 10:28 pm
    
    i fixed, but the next an i hope last problem:
    
    File “email.py”, line 2, in
    import smtplib, string, subprocess
    File “/usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py”, line 46, in
    import email.utils
    File “/home/pi/email.py”, line 27, in
    server = smtplib.SMTP(‘smtp.gmail.com:587’)
    AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘SMTP’
    
    Reply
  - any says:
    
    September 12, 2012 at 11:28 pm
    
    I did it! The problem was email.py – the name may not be used ;-)
    
    Thanks to Alex
    
    Reply
    - alex says:
      
      September 13, 2012 at 7:26 am
      
      Well done. :)
      
      Reply
Johan says:

February 2, 2013 at 7:35 pm

Hey Alex,

I forked your script and extended it to retry until the Pi has an IP and can reach the mail server. The code is up here: https://github.com/freenerd/findmypi

I also added an Apache License to make it truly open source. If that’s all not okay for you tell me and I’ll take it down again.

Thanks for the nice work you did.

Best,
Johan

Reply
- alex says:
  
  February 2, 2013 at 8:03 pm
  
  That’s fine Johan. I wouldn’t have published it freely if I was precious about it :)
  
  Keep us up to date with progress if you develop it further
  
  Reply
Luigi Pezzullo says:

January 25, 2015 at 3:57 pm

Ho installato e provato pifind.py, e funziona egregiamente.

Ma visto che basta cambiare l Sd per perdere definitivamente il PI ho deciso di disattivarlo.

Esiste un modo per DISINSTALLARE pifind.py e ripulire la distro?

Grazie.
____________________________________________________________________________________
I installed and tried pifind.py, and works well.

But since just change the Sd to permanently lose the IP I decided to turn it off.

Is there a way to UNINSTALL pifind.py and clean up the distro?

Thank You.

Reply
- alex says:
  
  January 25, 2015 at 6:26 pm
  
  yes, juse delete the files…
  pifind.py.gz
  and
  pifind.py
  
  using
```
rm pifind.* 
```
  Reply
agustin says:

February 10, 2015 at 4:04 am

Hi, i want to run this scrip every hour with crontab, I’ve edited crontab using the command

crontab -e

this is how my crontab looks:

—–SNIP—–
00 * * * * /home/pi/agustin/pifind.py

@reboot deluged

I tested crontab with an other script and worked fine. Also if I run the command:

/home/pi/agustin/pifind.py

works perfectly.

Am i missing something?

Kind Regards

Reply
- alex says:
  
  February 10, 2015 at 7:28 am
  
  I would change your crontab line to…
  00 * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/pi/agustin/pifind.py
  
  and see if that helps. That’s how I usually run Python scripts from cron. But there are other issues with cron, such as the need to specify absolute file paths for everything, which can cause issues that are very hard to track down.
  
  Reply
Gav says:

March 8, 2015 at 3:28 pm

Hi Alex,

I really like this code, it’s been really useful, thanks.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to add the external ip address to it, the output from curl ifconfig.me. I don’t suppose there is an easy way to do this?

Thanks,

Gavin.

Reply
Jacob says:

March 14, 2016 at 9:08 pm

Great script! I had to add sleep 60 as the first line of rc.local to get it working on my Raspberry Pi 3

Reply
OM says:

May 27, 2019 at 5:05 pm

Hi – great script! Very useful as it can also be used for other SBCs, such as Odroid & Pine. To reduce the requirement of checking the header for the IP address, I’ve added another variable which I then call in the subject line:
external_IP = subprocess.check_output(“wget -qO- http://ipecho.net/plain | xargs echo”, shell=True)

Has anyone managed to get Prey to work on RPi?

Thanks for this code :)

Reply