Update on SMS

Well I was given a 3G dongle which was on the three network, which I managed to unlock using both master unlock Master Unlock and then used the huawei modem code writer tool to flash the device Code Writer I believe these can be written by AT+ commands but I didn't investigate that route. One thing I noticed is that it didn't work on my desktop, I don't know if that's because it's on XP x64 or because the drivers weren't installed - anyway I plugged it into my laptop that has the drivers on for the previous dongle and it was detected fine and unlocked easily :)

I stuck in my old mobile's sim to see if that would work but it seems to have expired and needs topping up or something - anyway that involved effort so I ordered a couple of sims from vodaphone - I get crap reception on vodaphone compared to O2 but I'm informed that they dont expire if you don't top them up, so Ideal for my plans - I managed to order two from here for free Vodaphone so we will see if that works.

Another thing I was looking to build in was alerting around the credit available, I could either do this by counting the number of text's sent but I did stumble across a blog posting here blog which suggests that on vodaphone you can issue the command AT+CUSD=1,"*&1345;",15

which should return +CUSD: 0,"#14.66.",0

Which is your dongle's way of saying £14.66 remaining.

I have yet to try this but I am hopefull that it may work :)

I've also got two new books at work: The bash cookbook and Mastering Unix Shell scripting which may help me out with this process.

I've just been looking more into USB I/O boards though and decide that the
Veleman K8055
Looks a little pricey for what it does and what I want, I've since realised that my WRT job wont quite accomplish what I want due to the lack of a serial port and the fact that I never finished writing the demon that I started but gave up on due to my lack of interest/skills in the C language! Perl just seemed wrong, but I may go back to it!

Quick Update (26/07/2011)

Is that issuing the command to check balance doesnt quite work as said..

sending:

AT+CUSD=1,"*&1345;",15

results in:

OK


Hmm, need to look into this a little more :)