Pretty interesting perspective - maybe check out the Hologram Dash which is programmed with the Arduino IDE + has full compatibility with Arduino functions. It includes a cell modem as well: https://hologram.io/dash/
there's iridium SBD modems for low data rate/non-realtime comms (like position trackers) and full featured iridium voice/data modems integrated into a vast array of products now, in the land mobile, aviation and maritime segments.
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
Interesting. Does our product not seem simple? We're working on some fancy mesh protocol stuff for making DIY projects easy, but those features don't have to be enabled at all. You definitely could use this just like an arduino with a radio attached, we'll have full libraries for sending data to any device directly, and our code will have copyleft licences (thinking GPL, haven't decided yet) and we will encourage forks.
You can look at them as basically just compute and radio modules - they can be used however you'd like!
Cool thanks! It's exciting to run into an inexpensive LTE modem that can come in an easy to use package to use for stuff like this.
If you get to a point where you've learned some interesting things and generated documentation/video/etc send me a note on Twitter (@ borgel). Might make a good Hackaday writeup!
It's pretty decently deployed as far as I'm aware and I've yet to find anything that is in the same class without getting into some of the more esoteric modulation schemes(although LoRA is pretty impressive on it's own, for instance the different spread factors are orthogonal so you can have multiple devices transmitting at the same time without colliding if they use different factors).
I've found the AT modem command[3] based modules[1][2] to be fairly drop-in and usable, I was even able to pair via BT on my phone and use the BT serial TTY to send/recv without any specific software. It's pretty hard to beat ~$20 modules that you can just drop in and run over UART.
Keep in mind these are mostly for point-to-point although if I remember correctly you can also configure them for a standard LoRA deployment through that command interface as well.
Moteino (arduino-based wireless dev platform) supports LoRa if anyone is interested in digging into some current sub-$10 ISM transceivers and their capabilities. http://lowpowerlab.com/moteino/#lora it's also a great project to get started with arduino if you've never worked with it before. Really solid documentation.
Cool product! This is essentially a modern take on the radioteletype [0], which is much older than dial-up modem technology. You might find it interesting to study RTTY modulation schemes if you haven't already done so. (If you do end up implementing RTTY modulation schemes, it could make the product more popular among amateur radio enthusiasts, who use similar software already [1].)
Then add a $1 PIC to handle the glue logic and you're done. Collecting the dial pulses could probably be done with the USART configured to 10 baud and 9 bits (the first pulse counts as the start bit, and then you get up to 9 more, nicely mapping to the maximum of 10 pulses you need.) Or if you're really feeling adventurous, modify the original firmware to interface directly to the hardware... But that would mean doing real embedded work, and you wouldn't be able to mention "Arduino". ;-)
"First, catch your rabbit." - Old recipe for rabbit stew.
This lists a real serial modem as a prerequisite, and those are kinda getting to be collectors' items. Is it feasible to build a modem out of a Raspberry Pi Zero or an Arduino? You'd need to hook the phone line to the GPIO pins, do the ADC and DAC stuff in software, implement the V.22 protocol in software, and also implement the Hayes Smartmodem stuff in software, meaning this is one of the few times a Hacker News reader would have occasion to implement the Hayes Code. Is there any show-stopping problem I'm not seeing? Massive electrical incompatibility?
I remember the hate that closed-source Winmodem got back in the 90s but software-defined modems can be far superior to hardware. Case in point: direwolf. I think it decodes APRS better than any hardware solution.
Like the author mentioned, these are new-ish/emerging standards and there isn't a de-facto board like Arduino just yet. Therefore it's kind of hard to recommend a board that I know has a ton of documentation and a big community.
However, if you are the adventurous type and don't mind working with unpolished libraries and figuring things out from function descriptions, there are tons of smaller people putting out boards on Tindie: https://www.tindie.com/
But bottom line is that this tech isn't (yet) popular enough to try without getting a little dirty. If you can afford a bigger battery, try 900 MHz Xbee transmitters for an easy to interface serial with long range.
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