SMS Control for R410M

[snudge]

Hi,

I am a complete newby to Sodaq so please forgive a potentially easy question!

I am thinking of buying the SODAQ SARA Small Form Factor (SFF) R410M which I understand will work in many countries around the world. Although I use Arduino regularly, I have never worked with these IoT modules before. So I have some questions:

• Can I send SMS messages to the device to control its functions? I don't need anything else other than simple messages to control the board. The simpler the better.

• Will I have to do anything special to make SIM cards work around the world or do I just plug them in and they start working?

• When the board is idle, i.e. connected to the network but not transmitting or doing anything else, what it the power consumption? Low (average) power is very important to me.

That's it. These boards look fantastic so I really hope that I will be able to use them for my project!

Snudge

[M.Bend]

I'll try and answer most of your questions:

Q: Can I send SMS messages to the device to control its functions? I don't need anything else other than simple messages to control the board. The simpler the better.
A: Not sure, I haven't used SMS myself. I've been working with UDP messages.

Q: Will I have to do anything special to make SIM cards work around the world or do I just plug them in and they start working?
A: You do need to set some settings depending on the SIM provider you have. APN names and such.

Q: When the board is idle, i.e. connected to the network but not transmitting or doing anything else, what it the power consumption? Low (average) power is very important to me.
A: The board draws a decent ammount of power in IDLE mode, luckily the board has a Power Save mode in which it draws 3-4uA in which it can remain connected to the network.

If power ussage is important to you, I suggest you look into using NB-IoT instead of LTE or GSM. NB-IoT is way more power efficient than both of them. The R410 has some nice features like early release that make it so that it only draws about 150mAs. See this forum: https://forum.iot.t-mobile.nl/topic/278/how-much-battery-lifetime-can-we-expect-with-a-sara-n200-module-on-our-iot-network/2

Good luck!

[snudge]

Many thanks for your reply - this is much appreciated!

• Regarding SMS, this is important because I don't want to rely on some special application to send simple on/off control messages to the device. The great thing about SMS is that everyone has this capability on their cellphones.

• You kindly suggest the NB-IoT module. I see that we could get different ones for different regions which would be ok but it doesn't seem to be available in the SFF Arduino form. However...

• Regarding power, I think we can live with a few milliamps of power consumption so the R410M may be ok and if we can get down to 3-4uA with power saving mode that would be amazing.

So, the big question is whether or not I can send SMS messages to the R410M. Has anyone else managed to do this?

[snudge]

Perhaps this post confirms that SMS to R410M will work?

[snudge]

...but unfortunately if the information I have found on the web is correct there no LTE-M coverage here in the UK. Maybe this means I'll have to use NB-IoT.

[snudge]

Ok, lots of research later and I can see the difference between the 410 and the 412. However, although the 412 is a great device, posts on various forums seem to indicate that SMS availability it patchy so it looks like I can't rely on it. So, I will ask a different question in a new post!