Guard Dog Robot Project

I added a USB mobile connect card called ZTE MF636 ( GSM 900 MHz GSM 850 MHz GSM 1900 MHz GSM 1800 MHz ) to the design of guarddog ..

The card cost me 25 euros when an arduino GSM shield like the SM5100B costs more than 90 euros ( approx 105 including shipping costs ) ..
The USB GSM modem has much greater performance enabling 7.2Mbps internet access where WiFi is not present and there is network coverage , and also solves many power related problems utilizing the USB power supply..

To avoid reinventing the wheel for sms capabilities ( and while the GSM AT command is fairly straightforward ) I use gsm-utils that has a very nice daemon ( gsmsmsd ) for sending and receiving SMS. It makes a spooling directory for SMS and redirects Incoming SMS messages to a program of your choice , I start it with this parameter set

The sms input & output has been nicely integrated in the message passing RoboKernel and is beeing dealt with cleanly and uniformly along with the web interface , gui and console command line

https://github.com/AmmarkoV/RoboVision/commit/b38098f9f3f1eebdb91d016e2eea494b1ad49ba7

https://github.com/AmmarkoV/RoboVision/commit/da51cfdc3f97f22047293703206b0ac08a3a99a4

I also deactivated the PIN number on the SIM card in order to make it work out of the box..

I am very happy with it