Texting is something I love playing with, and I’ve always wanted to make a sensor-bot that skipped the hassle of wifi by texting me its data.
So this week, I tried to make some progress on that by making a texting bot.
The Texter
Texting with an Arduino requires two key parts: a cell phone board, which I got from Adafruit, and a SIM card, which I got pre-loaded with 6 months of unlimited data from Sparkfun.
The Adafruit guide is great, with one hitch — it didn’t support the older version of the Arduino software I was using on my laptop. Once I downloaded the new version, I was set.
Using the FONAtest example sketch from the guide, I easily sent myself a text, using “s” for “Send SMS.”
Results in:
The Twitters
Once I can text, I can tweet!
I went online to a Twitter account I tinker with and assigned a phone number to the account — the number of my SIM card, which I know because it’s the number I got a text from.
Twitter sends a confirmatinon text, and since I was still running the FONAtest program, it came in to my Arduino. By typing “r” can read all texts received, and was able to confirm the number with the code Twitter texted to me.
The next step? Direct my texts to Twitter’s short code, “40404.” And it worked!
Next Steps
My hope is to combine the texting code with this temperature sensor. So far, the texting code seems to scramble the temperature readings. Let the troubleshooting begin!
#MakeEveryWeek is a challenge to myself to do just that for all of 2015. The original post on the idea is here, and the running list of projects is here.