HouseBot

Is there a way in the future that HB would be able to send a text message if a property change is made?

Tally

Do you mean sending SMS?
In my country there's a bridge to send SMS messages from a PC. To use it, you have to buy a stock of messages in advance, and then you receive an application that can be used to send SMSs.
I'm sure that similar services are available elsewhere.
Running it from HB should be fairly simple.

Thats what im Hoping!!!

My Home alarm system can phone me if activated. Problem is i have no home line (landline) so i want to get it to send an SMS to my mobile.

Tally

The service I was reffering to is using an Internet connection.
Do you have an Internet connection at home? You can search for services like email to SMS in your region.

ICQ can send SMSs, and it's free!
However, I didn't find an external way to run it.
If someone finds such a DLL or exe, I will consider developing a plugin for it.

You also need a 'trigger' that will tell HB that the alarm system was activated. If you don't have one, you either need a serial communication with the alarm system (not all systems have it, and you need to know the protocol), or you can use a digital input like the digital IO

Yeah im sure i can get my program to see if the alarm is activated!

If it goes off it turns some lights/sirens that are X10 on. If the siren sounds it will change a state and i can get HB to do something with that im sure. (sure ive read it in here somewhere). think takeflight has done it.

I get an email when my marmitek alarm is triggered\set\disabled using x10 power state on/off. Seems to work fine for me.

Keep meaning to look into an email2sms gateway.

Al

Well if you find it mate please post how you did it.

Tally

Your cell phone service may already provide an email2SMS gateway. Mine does. Otherwise there are tons of email2SMS services out there. Just Google for email2sms gateway. I did this and besides finding many services, I found this website: SMS Hero. The Software supports a command line interface. Should be real easy to integrate it into HB. I have not tested it to see IF it actually works...

Each mobile operator in the USA has its own email2SMS gateway.

Especially for the UK users


http://www.intellisoftware.co.uk/sms%2D ... nterfaces/

Hi spike yoeah you said before but my internet provider does YET! should do later this year.

Davieboy, nice one thanks.

Tally

Hi All -

I have successfully configured my Housebot to send me a text message on my cell phone when the alarm is set off. The trigger is an X10 state to "on". When the trigger occurs, it will activate a script for an external program that will send me an e-mail or to an SMS gateway to my cell phone (my phone does both but SMS doesn't require full data connectivity for me to receive it - in theory, I get expanded coverage by using SMS instead of e-mail).

However, be forewarned that the built in SMTP plugin for Housebot does NOT have the ability to authenticate the user name and password with an ISP. In my case, my ISP is Comcast and they require an authentication handshake when sending an e-mail via their SMTP server. It is not possible to use an alternate SMTP server as they've locked it down to just using theirs.

Anyway, I found an external program to allow ESMTP which is basically an authenticated SMTP session and send my e-mails/messages that way outside of HB using an external program via script.

But, short answer is, yes it can be done. The key points are to find out how the alarm system will communicate its status to HB, and how HB can get the message out. There are more than one way to do this. I just mention mine because of the complication with using ESMTP.

Perhaps Scottbot can update the SMTP plugin to include support for authentication?

lo-hoo-ser and all.
For those who require smtp authentication you can use outlook to send whatever you want from housebot.I have been able to have outlook not only send this but also act on incoming emails.Emails can also be listed etc.Calendar reminders can also be put into housebot
(although I am working on the last bit of this)
Good to see this much activity