Send topic to cloud on SMS receipt using Raspberry Pi

[colonatas]

Hi everyone, newbie here.

I have a Nova with an activated SIM. Let’s presume everything, as far as connectivity goes, is working perfectly for the time being. I have a raspberry pi zero with the Nova connected, SDK is loaded up.

My current project concept in a nutshell:

• Someone sends an SMS to the number I purchased for my Nova, containing a command “do needful”
• The RPi executes a script “do_needful.sh”, which completes by sending a confirmation message with exit code back through the cloud via email router, or some other router

I was looking at an SMS chat example python script to get some ideas, but I’m not convinced that my simple project requires python. I believe this could be done with bash scripting alone.

Seems like folks here have some experience with the SDK… I was curious if anyone has some pointers or examples they can share that help accomplish a workflow like this? I see that the modem can be run in two modes; ‘agnostic’ mode and ‘cellular modem’ mode. Does one mode tend to consume more data than another for sending cloud messages, or is one of the modes not capable of doing so?

Ultimately I’d like to avoid sending a custom mobile app to the user, or requiring them to access a web site. Hence the thought of sending the command via SMS (and it’s free?). However, the completion/exit status message is going to an administrative user. I do not mind having to deploy a custom mobile app or slack channel post. It just needs to be readable from the admin’s mobile device and use as little data as possible.

I know these posts can suck. I wouldn’t be doing this normally but I feel like I am missing a chunk of documentation that is stuffed into the site somewhere…

Thank you for any advice you can provide,
-Cory

[AndrewGifft]

Why the aversion to python? it seems like the path of least resistance since most of the work is done for you (with the SDK and examples). If you walk away from the provided tools, yes documentation will be lacking (as all the documentation says “use the provided tools”). I would get your system working in python first and then decide whether its worth it to re-invent the wheel in bash.

Note I believe the hologram CLI interface is just a wrapper around (or pointers to) their python SDK so you will need to have python and the associated libraries installed anyway even if your main code isn’t in python.

If you 100% don’t want python then you will have to use AT commands directly as if you were directly connected to the U-Blox SARA modem, you can walk through Holograms open source Python SDK as the examples of commands you will need to send.

As far as the device modes, I am not that familiar with the the differences but you will want to configure it so the RPi does NOT recognize it as a network adapter otherwise it will try to download updates, do misc background tasks through the device like it would if it was on WiFi or ethernet.