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Build an SMS Forwarder with Raspberry Pi Zero W and Waveshare SIM7000E Hat
- gsich 6y agoNice I guess? The hat itself is somewhat expensive (for only GSM), especially compares to LTE USB sticks which can do the same (and more). But of course not as compact and nice looking.
- shadycuz 6y agoI'm not sure I understand. Does this thing do a man in the middle. Do you have to configure your phone to use it?
- akx 6y agoIt has a separate SIM card.
- pjmlp 6y agoBack in the day we use to call such devices gateways.
- flemhans 6y agoThey would be hooked up to a Nokia 6110 with a serial data cable and use Gammu :D Edit: I just noticed that Gammu is still a thing and even used in this article.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoWhen would you use this SMS gateway versus something like Twilio, Plivo, or Bandwidth.com terminating a DID for SMS service?
- jpollock 6y agoWhen you want to have telemetry from somewhere without access to a wifi network. The last I looked, SMS was also cheaper and lower power than mobile data.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTrue, but that's using SMS for telemetry (totally valid for use cases where power or connectivity are challenges) or remote control, not brokering SMS between another medium; this use case is forwarding SMS messages to Telegram. Maybe if you had a SIM for a geography that wasn't supported by a VoIP provider for programmatic access?
- jpollock 6y agoThink of this as much about being a learning exercise as anything else. The project doesn't need to stand on it's own - the creator gets to learn something about both sides. It's like seeing that M.2 is PCI-E, and wondering if they can plug a regular video card into it. :) Although for this project, I can construct systems in my head where this would be useful, centered around non-US mobile plans which are "calling party pays", with free on-net SMS. The US is "bill and keep", which makes sending SMS off-net largely the same as on-net from the carrier's point of view. In "calling party pays", having a device on the same network as the controlled device is about avoiding per-SMS charges. Author is in the UK, and UK is CPP. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227426633_Mobile_termination_charges_Calling_Party_Pays_versus_Receiving_Party_Pays https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227426633_Mobile_te...
- tyingq 6y agoI imagine they mean this specific use case where you need ip connectivity to Telegram anyway. If it were bridging to something local, it would make more sense.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThe problem is that fixed part of most plans’ pricing make the cost prohibitive, not the pay-as-you-go component (eg the cost of a sim and phone number). We were able to use a LoRa-like layer to forward to a base station that then uses a VoIP provider to do the brunt of the communication work.
- pjmlp 6y agoI hardly use more than a couple hundred from my 5 000 monthly budget to external networks, on the same network they are free.
- techsupporter 6y agoLots of businesses really, really want a mobile number from me for some reason, don’t accept VoIP numbers, and I don’t want to give them my real mobile number. So instead I have a stack of SIM cards plugged into GSM USB sticks (like this mostly is) and get the inbound messages sent to me via Pushover notification.
- ta1234567890 6y agoDo you have a recommendation for gsm usb sticks? Where do you get them? Do you use just one SIM card at a time, or do you have a usb stick that can hold (and operate) multiple SIM cards simultaneously?
- techsupporter 6y agoI look for them on eBay but I don't have any current recommendations. In fact, I'm digging around for LTE replacements at the moment since T-Mobile is ending their GSM-only service rather soon. I have a few USB sticks plugged into a powered USB hub and Gammu watches all of them for inbound messages.
- jandrese 6y agoDo you have dozens of phone bills to pay every month?
- robotmay 6y agoIn the UK you can get a SIM for free from most networks as pay-as-you-go (i.e. you add credit to it instead of getting a monthly bill). With most of those you can happily receive messages on it without ever spending a penny.
- techsupporter 6y agorobotmay who also replied to you is correct for what I do, I have multiple prepaid US SIMs with PAYGO rate plans. It's trivial to get many of these and register them in bulk to get "real" mobile numbers. (This is why I laugh and laugh at people who insist that VoIP numbers are more "fraudulent" because of whatever. Right now, breaking no rules whatsoever, I can get a hundred mobile numbers that any service will accept, and they'll go for a year without needing any more money. Stop using phone numbers as identity verifiers, people. All you're doing is making it harder for the people who aren't technically savvy and accomplishing nothing to prevent actual fraud.)
- ChrisRR 6y agoWhy does any engineer/developer do something from scratch when existing solutions exist? For fun
- lifty 6y agoDoes anyone know if you could you this combo to creat some kind of VoIP gateway that could forward calls to an app on an iPhone over the Internet?
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y agoYou could probably develop one if you want. This is exactly what ride-hailing app Grab did in their app to make a call without exposing their phone numbers by forwarding calls to their server instead.
- _joel 6y agoI'm pretty certain they wouldn't have used a raspberry pi for that
- gsich 6y agoThere is something for Asterisk called chan_dongle. Then you can use any SIP client on your iPhone to connect to that Asterisk and make/recieve calls.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danielschonfeld 6y agoCan someone please explain to me the appeal of telegram (as opposed to signal)? Maybe I don’t understand something or am too old but how is it a safe haven compared to WhatsApp in the wake of the WhatsApp debecle. I just fail to understand.
- bayesianbot 6y agoThe APIs for bot programming for telegram are great - good documentation, stable, lots of options/libraries for different languages, and possible to do much more complex bots than other messaging platforms.
- seniorivn 6y agotelegram is not secure, but it has secure secret chats feature it works, but nobody uses telegram for it's secret chats telegram is superior in 2 ways, ui/ux polishness and having an open api and native open source clients for all platforms the only potential competitior in that regard is matrix, but it's not there yet
- keyme 6y agoIt feels to me that Telegram is the closest thing to old school IRC that we "have"* right now. You can have public/private channels, you don't see other peoples phone numbers for no reason (you see their chosen nicks), you have bots, broadcasts and more. * That has any reach beyond the people who would scoff at this sentence.
- lofi_lory 6y agoTelegram is not at all secure compared to Signal (in theory). However it has an awesome UI and lots of nice features (most of which are lost using secret chats). For the longest time these were exclusive features to telegram compared to Signal: * Delete messages at other party ("undo"), critical for deleting accidentally sent nudes. * Username only communication * Stickers (silly, but well kinda fun) * Bots (very easy to make your computer talk to your phone or a group this way) * link preview * Self messages as easy link/file sharing between devices. Super useful. Signal is slowly catching up, but it's so buggy at times, I am starting to really hate it/distrust it (I also dislike MM's personality/opinions). Matrix seems to move at a better pace, with more useful features already (e.g edit, markdown, some fun things). I am happy to get rid of telegram for Matrix. One feature better then the other already: resync of lost messages from the distributed network and no reliance on telephone numbers as UID.
- z92 6y agoIf you can't purchase the GNSS HAT, use an old Android phone and install Termux on it. Then run some bash scripts on the phone that will do the job. The phone will communicate with your network over wifi, and replaces both the Raspberry PI and the HAT.
- efazati 6y agoFor solving a problem always there are millions of ways..
- theodric 6y agoIt's likely that this one is cheaper and more accessible to many, many people, including those in developing countries, since it doesn't rely on sourcing quasi-obscure hardware like the HAT
- newhouseb 6y agoAlso important to note that the Android approach is more likely to continue to work. In many places (certainly Manhattan, where I am), everything but LTE (and I gues 5G) has long been turned off such that GSM/Edge/UMTS/etc no longer work.
- guenthert 6y agoWhat? I'd think lots of IoT and other automated data service relies on cheap and less-than-bleeding-edge technology. 3G coverage seems to include Manhattan (and most of the USA): https://www.whistleout.com/CellPhones/United-States/New-York https://www.whistleout.com/CellPhones/United-States/New-York
- fsagx 6y agoCell site visualization tool featured on HN front page a few days ago shows thousands of 2g and 3g sites in NYC https://alpercinar.com/open-cell-id/ https://alpercinar.com/open-cell-id/
- 6y ago
- Jnr 6y agoI use gammu-smsd and forward it to iOS using Pushover. For the serial AT modem I use random Huawei LTE USB stick that I bought for 15 EUR years ago. It was so cheap because it was provider locked, but there are keygens floating around internet that allow unlocking it to work on any network.
- keyme 6y agoWhy isn't there something that turns a rooted Android phone into a VOIP <-> Cell network gateway? Something that allows incoming calls to be forwarded to SIP, and vice versa? I haven't found something like that.
- naivedevops 6y agoMaybe because nobody had a strong enough use case to feel compelled to implement it. There are very cheap GSM to SIP gateways, that are way less expensive than a mobile phone.
- Teever 6y agoDo you have any links for those? I can't imagine them being much cheaper than a free used smartphone that many people have lying around or the price of a used phone from a pawnshop or ebay -- $50.
- naivedevops 6y agoMaybe not as cheap as an used phone, but close: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mK1XuTt https://a.aliexpress.com/_mK1XuTt
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gsich 6y agoNot possible with most devices. I wanted something similar, no result. Seemed like a hardware restriction that phone calls go to either the speaker or Bluetooth.