I’d be curious to know what carriers I could use with the dongle here in the USA..?
I’ve been trying to make an IoT project and being that T-Mobile is shutting down their 3G GSM there’s only a few IoT devices that are licensed and approved for use with Verizon and AT&T for the 4G band.
:/
Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#42Why not have even less moving parts? Nearly every SMS/MMS address is backed by an email address. Look up email to sms gateway list and go for it, sans dongle.
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#43Why not have even less moving parts? Nearly every SMS/MMS address is backed by an email address. Look up email to sms gateway list and go for it, sans dongle.
Sending an email requires a data connection, which might not be available when the power goes out.
When there's a local power cut, most people switch to using cellular data, overloading the local backhaul. The same problem doesn't affect outbound SMS.
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#44I’d be curious to know what carriers I could use with the dongle here in the USA..? I’ve been trying to make an IoT project and being that T-Mobile is shutting down their 3G GSM there’s only a few IoT devices that are licensed and approved for use with Verizon and AT&T for the 4G band. :/
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Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#45I’m not sure if anyone actually looked at the code for the PHP-based API-gateway, but as a TLDR: it’s trivially injectable to give RCEs and not really hardeneded nor is input sanitized properly at all.
I realize this is meant for deployment on a local trusted network, but I still think that’s worth putting somewhere in big bold fonts.
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#46Id love something like this with meshtastic/Lora support to link a mesh to cell via SMS
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of paying for a separate SIM, I've been piggybacking on the "data only" SIMs that Google Fi let's you add to a normal subscription. No extra per-SIM fees, and you just pay for whatever data it uses at $10/gb. More details on my modem, monitoring setup, and IPMI backhaul strategy using Wireguard here: http://jsharkey.org/ipmi/
It surprises me how many people are willing to let Google know their home address.
They already know.
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#48I’d be curious to know what carriers I could use with the dongle here in the USA..? I’ve been trying to make an IoT project and being that T-Mobile is shutting down their 3G GSM there’s only a few IoT devices that are licensed and approved for use with Verizon and AT&T for the 4G band. :/
Shouldn't be anything special to what you were doing with 3G, there are dozens of cheap 4G dongles or hat and certification isn't really any more special (heck Verizon even recommends and shows how to set up and configure a particular $30 5G/4G modem they connect to a Pi in their ThingSpace tutorial).
As far as plans every major carrier has 4G IoT plans, prepaid or not depending on what you want. Also look into places like Databalaze if you're doing something at scale commercially.
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#49I made something similar a few years back with a Pi 1 and a GSM "hat". It came with a C SDK so I had to write AT commands to communicate directly with the modem and it worked great until I didn't need it anymore. Its purpose was to text me when my power or internet connection went down at home then I could respond with commands such as to shutdown the servers etc. When power/network came back it would text me the new…
> The biggest challenge with the whole setup was finding a SIM from a provider who would let me top it up once per year and maybe send half a dozen texts in that time without deactivating the SIM, for a reasonable price Good point - so-called "pre-paid" SIMs seem to be hidden subscriptions nowadays. Does anyone have a table of suitable low-usage, long-term SIM vendors?
You might want to say what location you are in for a truly useful answer.
In the UK at least most providers keep the SIM active if it sees some activity in a given space of time¹ irrespective of top-up activity². So if “low” use stretches as far as one text every month or two maybe just have it send an “I'm still here” message regularly. Also acts as a double-check that not getting alerts means all is OK instead of that the alerting service is broken.
1: the GiffGaff one I used for pure data for a week-and-a-half when my landline was down in2020, shut off after three months and a few nagging texts IIRC
2: though if you don't top-up once per month you usually drop onto the basic tariff, so no more “unlimited texts”, but if you are topping up that infrequently that is probably fine
Re: Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
#50I made something similar a few years back with a Pi 1 and a GSM "hat". It came with a C SDK so I had to write AT commands to communicate directly with the modem and it worked great until I didn't need it anymore. Its purpose was to text me when my power or internet connection went down at home then I could respond with commands such as to shutdown the servers etc. When power/network came back it would text me the new…
A good free way to achieve this is to use Signal. This project https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli enables you to send Signal messages from the command line, including from Raspberry Pis. It obviously needs an internet connection to work, but has the added bonus of being more secure than SMS.
Neat tech, but probably not super appropriate for this person's particular application, which involved detecting network outages.