Arduino GSM shield tutorial

Arduino
Arduino GSM shield tutorial
20110124GSMShieldSM.jpg

While it would be very useful, the thought of putting my Arduino projects on the GSM wireless network intimidates me a bit. Luckily, John Boxall of tronixstuff walks us through the process in part one of his Sparkfun GSM Shield tutorial. He breaks down how to dial a number and send a text message by sending AT commands via serial to the GSM module. It actually looks fairly straightforward. But knowing how often I’ve had my Arduino projects go off the rails, I’ll definitely be taking his advice:

Telephone calls and text messages (SMS) can cost real money, so if your sketch goes bonkers and blasts out a few hundred text messages while you’re in the kitchen having tea, you will have to pay for them. It may be prudent to use a prepaid cellular account for testing purposes.

In part two of his GSM shield tutorial, John plans on integrating a GPS receiver and showing us how to interact with our projects via SMS to get sensor data. In the meantime, I’m upgrading my texting plan.

8 thoughts on “Arduino GSM shield tutorial

  1. josiahritchie.myopenid.com says:

    It would be really neat to see someone take this to using Nagios or Zabbix to send them a text message when their network connected equipment has problems. I could have Nagios monitoring all sorts of interesting points around my house, letting me know if the pipes are nearing freezing, the dogs water bowl is empty, the plants need watering, my electric usage is going high and get a txt message for any of these things along with lots of data graph this all out.

  2. Boris Landoni says:

    Hi, 
    have you see the GSM shield with SIM900? The SIM900 is the cheaper module now avalaible.
    http://www.open-electronics.org/arduino-gsm-shield/

  3. salvatore says:

    caro sig Boris per favore mi invia un esempio come memorizzarei numeri telefonici nello scudo gsm sim 900 vi ringrazio anticipatamente grazie

    1. Open-Electronics.org says:

      @Salvatore,
      you can find the GSM/GPRS library with example on the google code http://code.google.com/p/gsm-shield-arduino/

  4. keven says:

    You may need arduino SIM900 Quad-band GSM/GPRS module here: http://www.elecfreaks.com/store/gprsgsm-moduleefcom-pro-efcompro-p-450.html

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Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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