Blynk and SMS via BTLE; no Internet required, with Simblee

1

Hi all-

Fascinating system.

The demo I saw was about the Arduino or equivalent being hooked up to the Internet, and the phone talking to the device that way. Got it! Neat. The good part is the ability to customized the phone side, which is the biggie for this project.

What if I just want to have an Arduino equivalent (actually a Simblee - a much smaller form factor, and built in BTLE) sensor trigger an SMS message on the phone? Is this possible? I read earlier stuff about sending virtual text messages via email (phonenumber@att.net, for example).

I checked the FAQ, but nothing on Bluetooth Low Energy.

Thanks.

2

Take a look here http://1sheeld.com/ ,i found someone sending SMS with it ,but unfortunatly it’s not using Blynk :cry:

3

Yes, that was an option, but the Blynk system allows you to customize the app so much better.

I think this can be done with Blynk, but would like to get a confirm from up the food chain.

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4

@andrewa you can send sms via email using operator SMS gateway for free. You can also install Local Blynk server and sign up to SMS service (usually paid) and send sms directly via

Blynk.sms(message);

However all this requires internet connection from your hardware.

5

It requires an Internet connection for the hardware? I would think that the Arduino/Simblee, talking via BTLE to the phone would be sufficient enough for the phone to send an SMS message using the phone, but not the Internet.

I could see requiring Internet for setup/compile/download, but once the app is working, can’t it just send the SMS message? Or is there something I’m missing here, “under the hood” of the Blynk system?

Thanks!

6

Do you mean BLE? If so what the point of sending sms via BT?

7

Ah, confusion, I think…

We have a small device, that speaks BTLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to the smartphone (BLE = BTLE, I assume? Or this part of the confusion?)

The smartphone is on the regular cellular 3G/4G network. The small device, when triggered, sends a simple message to the phone, and then the phone sends an SMS message.

When you send an SMS (text message), as far as I know, this doesn’t require Internet connectivity, just connectivity to the phone network. Hence, even flip-phones get SMS messages - it isn’t on the Internet, but it is on the phone network.

Again, I may be missing something obvious here.

8

@andrewa at present the Blynk app doesn’t have any interface to your Smartphone. The only interface is to Blynk servers and if the server is local there is a facility to configure it to send out an SMS but it isn’t sent by the phone.

You can also get the Blynk app to send an SMS with the Cloud server via email 2 SMS gateways. So basically the app can send out emails from the server (local or cloud) and then your email2SMS provider handles the SMS part.

There is a thread on the forum about some of the gateways available.

9

Ah! (Smacks head!) Of course. All clear to me now!

OK, so you do need the Internet; the phone isn’t doing the SMS stuff! Neat.

Direct SMS from the phone would be nice, though; cuts down the load on your end.

10

If you have a link to the gateways, that would be great.

I think I can’t do what I want to do here. I can build a test app to talk to the Simblee over BLE from the phone to turn a bit on (just the BLE widget and the button widget), so I’ve got the basic premise down, I think, at least in one direction; phone to Simblee. I thought that would also allow the reverse direction, but the app doesn’t have any connection to the phone at present, as you noted.

Getting values back from the Simblee (or sending an email) always seems to require the Ethernet.h library in the examples I’ve seen so far, unless I’m missing something.

Great app and idea, though.

The 1sheeld option - that’s my next stab at this.

11

Take a look at http://www.textlocal.com/

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