Phone the garage door?

[eclectic]

I “found” this, browsing the Rapid Catalogue.

http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Projects-Robotics/Project-Kits/Mobile-phone-operated-switch/74248/kw/


A Very, very long distance switch?
(Assuming that the destination has, say, 12V+ power.)

One cheap / free mobile. Switching on /off almost anywhere.

Then instead of the LDR, how about using this

http://194.201.138.187/epages/Store.storefront/?ObjectPath=/Shops/Store.TechSupplies/Products/PPM170

You could phone the garage door, your datalogger, your central heating, .....

e

 

[Andrew Cowan]

Neat. Just wondering if it is possible for a PICAXE to listen to phone calls? If so, it could act when it hears a DMTF tone, and then do the appropriate thing. Many more possibilities.

Obviously you would need a chip to decode the DMTF - do chips exist which can be plugged straight into a phone socket?

A

 

[eclectic]

Neat. Just wondering if it is possible for a PICAXE to listen to phone calls? If so, it could act when it hears a DMTF tone, and then do the appropriate thing. Many more possibilities.

Obviously you would need a chip to decode the DMTF - do chips exist which can be plugged straight into a phone socket?

A

In this case, my considered opinion is "not a clue".
But it's probably Illegal!

However, for further research, the datasheets show
that the Velleman unit has variable On/Off timings.

http://www.velleman.be/ot/en/product/view/?id=350454

e

 

[testerrrs]

Andrew, you mean DTMF

I don't see why it would be illegal. If a phone has a headset port, the ringtone could be sampled or fed through tone decoding systems before being ADC'd by a PICAXE.

If there's some way of picking up the call, DTMF encode/decode wouldn't be too difficult. In fact two tones could be used for AFSK communication.

 

[nbw]

Does anyone know the range of the Rev-Ed LED-phone-flasher? I bought a Dalek one (same principle) from a UK store that said the phone had to be within 1m of the Dalek to activate it... try no more than 2cm, with 3 brand new button cells.

Interested to hear if anyone's used these little units before.

 

[eclectic]

Does anyone know the range of the Rev-Ed LED-phone-flasher? I bought a Dalek one (same principle) from a UK store that said the phone had to be within 1m of the Dalek to activate it... try no more than 2cm, with 3 brand new button cells.

Interested to hear if anyone's used these little units before.

http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Projects-Robotics/Sound-Music-Light-Modules/Mobile-phone-flashing-indicator-module/60528/kw/mobile+flash

Range?
"Effective distance, .... could be up to ........ "

But, for the price, who cares?

e

 

[Technical]

The PPM170 has to be pretty close to the phone, within about 15cm or so. Connecting one of the spare 'LED outputs' directly to a PICAXE input works fine. The LEDs flash for a few seconds, so the PICAXE program has to account for the fact that the LEDs have to stop before the system can be reset.

 

[MPep]

If you want to connect to a phone line, not cellular, then why not consider using an old external modem? Must be plenty out there.
Then a PICAXE can simply listen to AT commands from the modem, and if required, talk back. Obviously only tones can be heard, but if you set up an acknowledge of, say, 3 beeps, then that is a start.

Just a thought.

 

[nbw]

15cm would be a useful distance. These Daleks were meant to be for people to get a visual alert when their phone in their bag went (if it was on silent). 2cm doesn't really cut it... it didn't go through my (wife's) handbag to the Dalek attached outside.

 

[kevrus]

Using a DTMF decoder is not difficult...
http://www.picaxeforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=12417

The dis-advantage of DTMF is that it requires the phone line to be 'answered' before DTMF can be sent, hence there will be the cost of the call...not expensive though unless you've got yourself a premium rate number

Now, a SMS controlled set of relays, that would be neat

 

[dobber]

check this out-

http://www.dschmidt.com/dtmf.html#D16-RLY

 

[andrew_qld]

About 10 years ago Silicon Chip or Electronics Australia had a PIC based phone remote control kit. You could use a picaxe to talk serial over a standard PSTN modem or interface directly with an cellphone.

When I was in QLD we used some neat SMS "modems" which dialed up Telstra and sent a text message using PET protocal when an input was triggered. I captured the serial strings these things send and have often thought of building a picaxe based version. From memory its only about 300 or 1200 baud.

 

[mark.duyvesteyn]

yesterday i did a similar project...

I using a 08m and LDR and an old cellphone to to turn my electric blanket on.

i work shift so come home at different times each night/ morning (effectively an 8 day week) so a standard timer wouldnt cut it.

The LDR picks up the incoming call or sms, then turns on a relay for an hour then turns off again.

Now the really cool part, google calendar lets you send free reminder sms's to your mobile phone. So i have set up my work schedule and now i know i will always come home to a warm bed. The google calander interface is far easier to change then prodding lots of little button in sequence on a little keypad

I installed it last night and is working good. I am charging the mobile phone off the 5v voltage reg, how ever it is getting a bit hot so might need to rethink that one.... I might mount the original charger inside it.

 

[Innes]

Using SMS for remote control

Hi,

I am an irregular contributor to this board, but pop back here every now and again when I have ideas buzzing around my head. I noticed this thread regarding the use of a mobile phone for remote control, and like the simple idea of using an LDR to detect when the phone is ringing. It would be great for certain projects, but I have found that even on very old PAYG phones, I still get 'random' sales calls and also wrong numbers, which could play havoc with the controlled devices.

I was trying to think of a more 'sophisticated' method when it occurred to me that many phones have a connector on the bottom/side which is used for syncing with PCs, etc. It turns out that many common phones have a simple serial connection included in the port that can be treated as a modem to communicate with the phone using AT commands. It occured to me that the Picaxe should be able to communicate with this type of phone, and sure enough, someone has beaten me too it (almost!); I found a fairly detailed article about using an old mobile phone to receive SMS message which can then be read by an ATtiny12 microprocessor. I can't see why a Picaxe is not up to the job! http://www.riccibitti.com/tinyplanet/tiny_article.htm

A little Googling turns up suitable phones; I just searched for the model number of various old phones that I have lying around, along with the text "rs232 cable", and if an RS232 cable is available for the phone, then it pretty-well must have an RS232 port!

Further thoughts include the fact that a Windows Mobile phone can have applications written for it which can read / send / process SMSs and emails (and access the Internet), and if interfaced to a Picaxe could be utilised for some very sophisticated data logging and remote access purposes.

Considering the cost of an old mobile phone (often free) and the ability to receive SMSs for free (and often send them free via the Internet), there appears to be a lot of potential here. It's going to be a summer holiday project for me (I'm a teacher), but perhaps the above info and thoughts could be of use to someone else in the meantime.

I apologise if these issues have been discussed before in this forum, but I did have a quick look without success.

 

[eclectic]

@Innes.

It seems that Velleman have tried to combat the random call aspect:

http://www.velleman.be/ot/en/product/view/?id=350454

then

http://www.velleman.be/downloads/0/instructionmanual_mk160.pdf


OR, of course, you could go
really OTT and use TWO phones
with suitable timing/interrupt software.


e

 

[hippy]

That's a good link, thanks.

It should be relatively straight forward to handle SMS reception on a PICAXE -

Initialise the phone for SMS reception
Wait for an indication of SMS received
Read the SMS
Decode the SMS PDU
Verify sender / checksum / whatever
Execute SMS message instruction(s)
Delete the SMS
Repeat

The hard part in the past has been that the data received is asynchronous and of variable length, and there's often not enough time to turn round to receive data when it's been asked for. High-speed serial of the PICAXE-X1's and X2's should overcome those problems.

The Tiny Planet technique uses some clever tricks and short-cuts which makes handling things quite easy. I'm not so sure about storing messages in-phone as against on-SIM as the later are likely to be retained if there is a power failure making for easier setup. Most phone 'RS232' ports are 3V3 in my experience and the serial interface could be greatly simplified.

I would not try and convert the ATtiny code per se but taking the ideas and implementing on a PICAXE would be a good approach. A PICAXE-X1 or 2 would in comparison be more powerful and very likely capable of decoding the actual PDU messages rather than having to compare with a limited set of predefined ones. If the phone doesn't have to send SMS acknowledgement it's an even simpler proposition.

 

[SilentScreamer]

Many phones have setting that block numbers that aren't stored on the SIM/phone book. Why not enforce that rule to prevent problems?

 

[kevrus]

co-incidentally, ive been experimenting with sending AT commands from hyperterminal to a spare samsung...haven't yet progressed to a picaxe but the AT commands themselves are not that difficult.

Ive built a DTMF controller and am considering a combined DTMF and SMS project

This is a good explanation of the protocols...(even I followed the bits that I read)

http://www.developershome.com/sms/cscaCommand.asp

 

[ad8bc]

'twould be cool to do this over a radio link instead of phone... you could send a DTMF signal from a UHF or VHF handheld or mobile-mount ham radio and use an old scanner or other receiver with a DTMF decoder attached to a PIC on the other end... and this would generally be legal, at least in the US, if you have your ham radio license (not hard to get).

 

[MPep]

I have always wanted to see if I could get a PICAXE to do PDU encoding/decoding. Not straight-forward, although I have a Stamp-based project's code.
Must see about converting that some time....what was that??..Ohh that's right, I need time for that!

 

[hippy]

I've done PDU encoding and decoding on a PC and it's really just bit shifting and masking as far as I remember. The main requirement is to have enough memory to store the original message and the decoded/encoded version. The X1's and X2's should have enough.

The easiest way to develop the code is standalone; put the entire message as would be received in Eeprom, copy that to Ram, write a Gosub which decodes it into other Ram. That way you can write the software without any phone and use the simulator for debugging.