Sometimes understanding and developing technology involves years of research, testing, documenting and publishing. Other times, though, it’s just a couple hours of messing around and posting a video online. When applicable, we really like the latter approach.
Here’s one such project. We do a lot of work in mobile, and we also have a decent amount of experience working with electronics. Yesterday afternoon I put together a quick proof of concept combining the two. Here’s controlling an LED from a text message:
The SMS is handled by our Gumband API. We then have a small PHP script on a server that returns new text message data from Gumband. A small program running locally on a laptop pulls that data and parses it for defined commands—in this case “on” or “off”—and then translates those into events which it sends to an Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino can then activate hardware circuits like turning on a light, or any manner of other physical changes.