NFC (or alternative) device to send data from phone to server - nfc

What i want to do is get some kind of nfc reader so i can put my smartphone on top of it and it sends some data to my server. For example i have app where i store my name and when i put my phone on top of the device it sends "John says hi" to my server.
I am not sure which keywords i should use to find this kind of device but i think that there should be devices like that because there is mobile pay etc.
And if there is not any devices like that is there any alternatives for example device that works with bluetooth?

You could simply buy a cheap NFC-Tag and program it, so that it opens an URL on your Server or start an App which sends something to your server.
They are very cheap and easily programmable.

Related

WiFi Text Services

I'm trying to come up with a solution to this situation:
Imagine you are in an area and you do not have any cell phone service but you do have Wifi.
The ask is to have a user that only has data to be able to text a number (via iMessage) and get a confirmation code in return.
The first tool I thought would be necessary for this would be Twilio - but it seems like Twilio only sends over standard SMS.
Are there any other tools out there anyone have used that would work in this idea? Something similar to Twilio but only ran on data?
Twilio developer evangelist here.
This is something you can only do as the phone provider or network provider (using Three in the UK allows me to make phone calls over wifi with no phone signal, for example).
The two things you can do is either build yourself a native application that you can send messages to using push notifications or send messages to existing native apps, like Messenger, Viber or Line.

Can a web application use a personal phone to send a text message

I have a client who sends about 5000 SMS messages each month. They are currently doing this from an iPhone, by actually typing the message in to the phone. (I think the messages are quite repetitive, and are often addressed to groups).
The reason that they are not using an online message gateway is purely the cost. We can use a gateway here in Australia (such as Amazon SMS) for about 7.5 cents for transactional (and 2.5 cents for promotional, though I don't know if this is reliable enough).
When the client uses their own iPhone, the SMS is included in their plan, and costs them nothing extra.
I am building a web-based application for the client and the question is 'Can I send SMS via a handset connected to the client's desktop PC'. I think the answer is no, but would like to be surprised. The application is responsive, so what about if they triggered the messages from a browser on the phone? Still no?
If you could use an Android phone instead an iPhone, you could create a small gateway app on the Android that can send text messages without the need for the user's intervention.
It could work like this:
The Android app would have a simple REST interface, a good start could be https://github.com/NanoHttpd/nanohttpd.
An endpoint in the Android app could send messages, see Sending SMS programmatically without opening message app
The software on the computer would use the rest endpoint on the Android phone to send the message.
This wouldn't work on the iPhone because it doesn't allow an app to send a text message without the user's intervention.

How to receive an sms in a desktop pc?

I am stuck in the midst of a project. The project requires that a desktop pc must receive an sms sent from a mobile phone. How can I accomplish this? Please help.
You can connect a GSM Modem like this one to the serial port. It acts like a mobile phone with its own SIM card. I'm sure there are other products for USB.
On the software side, you can check for SMS messages by talking with AT commands to the device. I've done that in Perl and in .NET "manually", but maybe there are some out-of-the-box solutions.
i know (and have used) 2 ways to do this.
The quick, dirty and hacky way is to buy a mobile phone and connect it to your PC with a serial cable, then use old fashioned AT commands to control the phone (including listening for new SMS messages).
Many older Nokias support this, though it's not hugely well documented - this is about the best resource I found: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/AT_Commands.
There are many exciting ways this can fail - you have to keep the phone charged, and in a data centre, reception is often pretty poor.
The alternative is to talk to a mobile aggregator (Google for likely candidates in your area). These are companies that can set up SMS short codes, and have APIs for forwarding the messages to you; APIs vary between the providers. This is usually fairly expensive - shortcodes cost money, sending and receiving SMS messages costs money, and the aggregator may not have deals with countries you care about. Caveat emptor, and all that.
You would also need a library to send/receive the AT commands to and from the modem.
See http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vb/phonesmsrecv.aspx
This software can help you. It uses a GSM/3G modem attached to a PC. It can store incoming SMS messages in a database, save to files, forward them to a webserver, in real-time.
(A 3g/gsm modem has a SIM card and therefore has its own phone number to which sms messages can be sent)

Send data from WP7 phone to PC via USB cable

I’d be interested in show data from wp7 sensors on a PC screen. Is it possible to send data back to the PC via the USB cable?
When the phone is plugged in via USB it appears as an Ethernet network connection to the device. This means it is easy enough to send data back to a service running on your machine using standard HTTP calls.
This is easily done by setting up a simple web service on your PC and generating a WCF proxy around it in Silverlight. You can then simply use it as you would any other web service.
If you are looking for lower level serial access to the USB itself, then unfortunately no the phone APIs don't expose that functionality.

connecting computer to a mobile phone - reading sms and use it?

I've absolutely no idea if this is possible and how it would work.
is it possible to give users a phonenumber where they should send an sms to.
e.g. the sms contains
name
some code
i want to track how many sms are sent to this number.
i want to read the sms text and use both nodes
they weird way i imagine this: i buy a prepaid simcard from any phone provider, i plug the simcard into any device (sim-reader :) ) connected to my computer. my computer is ONLINE. so my computer is kind of transformed to a mobile phone. some software is able to retrieve those sms and i can use the data in it.
is that even possible, if yes HOW?
You can use e.g. gammu to send and receive SMS from a cellphone connected to your computer - essentially creating a SMS gateway. I've succesfully used it in the past in this setup (newer phones have serial port emulation through USB, for older ones you need a model-specific serial-to-phone cable):
my program <-> database/textfiles <-> gammu <-> serial port <-> cellphone
The operation was as follows:
gammu ran in the command line/daemon mode, with a watchdog script restarting it (and the cellphone) if the cellphone became unresponsive (this was a really old phone; a watchdog is probably not necessary with anything > 2006)
gammu polled the cellphone for new messages, those were store into a "received" table in the database.
gammu also polled an "outgoing" table in the database for messages I wanted to send, and sent them through the cellphone.
my program was a web frontend for reading the incoming messages or inserting the outgoing ones.
(Gammu has an API to interface with the cellphone directly, without the database; I decided to keep the backend and frontend parts separate, and since the frontend was using the database for other things anyway, it was easiest to go that way; also, I was using an old phone for this, and needed the frontend to run even if the cellphone wasn't responding)
There are several possibilities listed here. But it depends on the phone you are using. Symbian, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile. But basically it is possible using a GSM Modem.

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