One thing to note is the pricing of the SNS service. You can currently send 100 SMS messages and 1000 emails a month for free. If you exceed these limits you will be charged a small fee, so be careful with your SNS use in projects. The code for this project implements a configurable time-based limit of how often a notification can be published. Using a rate limit like this will help keep you from exceeding the limits of the SNS service free tier.
Before you can set up the SNS service, you must first create an Amazon Web Service account if you don't have one already. To create an account you can follow the steps under 'Sign up for the Service' at this link. Make sure to save the access key and secret access keys for your AWS account in a handy place as they will be needed later in the configuration of the Arduino sketch.
Once you have an AWS account, follow the steps below to setup SNS publishing for this project:
- Topic ARN - This ARN value uniquely identifies the SNS notification topic and will be used in the pet food bowl sketch configuration.
- Region - The region identifies where the SNS notification topic was created. This value will be used in the pet food bowl sketch configuration.
Set up whatever subscription you prefer for this project. Note that each subscription has to be validated by replying to an email/SMS message.
Continue on to learn about the software used in this project.