BY Michelle Howie 15 July 2021
Learn how to set up on-demand SMS updates for your IoT devices.
Potential use cases
If you have an environmental sensor set up in your home, office or farm, you don’t want to have to physically go and take a sensor reading every time you want to check the temperature. There are already handy dashboards you can connect your device to (such as the Arduino Cloud or Telstra IoT Platform), but if you're in a rush, you can now ask the device to update you via SMS on demand. We could potentially set this solution up to automate updates every hour, minute, week, or when a threshold is exceeded (like in the next example) but this project focuses on on-demand data.
Using Arduino to send and receive SMS commands
This blog follows on from our earlier blog Use SMS to control your IoT device, in which we set up an Arduino board connected to Telstra's NB-IoT network, that flashes its LED light on or off based on an SMS command. I tweaked this slightly, to be able to send SMS commands as well as receive them, so we can get information off the device with remote sensors. This is the overall flow that handles inbound messages requesting specific sensor info, and uses the most up-to-date sensor readings from our Arduino ENV Shield via an IoT broker to send the response:
Our Arduino device is subscribed to an IoT broker that updates the latest sensor reading every minute. When an SMS is sent to our virtual mobile number (from Telstra’s Messaging API Free Trial), it's forwarded to the http endpoint here in Node-Red, where we then match the text payload to some expected keywords (i.e temp, humidity, UV) and create a reply message payload based on what data has been asked for.
Ask your device for the “temp”, for example, and it will send you back the last known temperature reading in Celsius.
We are able to map this process pretty easily using the low-code flow in Node-Red:
This code is all available in my GitHub repo for you to use, just replace your own credientials.
A similar flow could be used to get on-demand readings from any other critical system you want to check in on, like the water level of a drinking trough on your remote farm, or the location of your package travelling across Australia. Pretty handy to be able to poll for that data, rather than wait for an automatical alert (we'll get to those in our next blog).
Find out more
To see more detail or try this out yourself, check out my GitHub for the source code and detailed instructions.
GitHub Repo + ReadMe: https://github.com/MichelleHowie/IoTSensorData_OnDemand
This tutorial was originally presented in a workshop at Call For Code with DeveloperSteve Coochin, June 2020: https://video.ibm.com/channel/23832688/video/cfc2020-telstradev-iotworkshop
To see how SMS alerts can be triggered by sensor input from your IoT device in emergencies, head to part 3 of this series.
