Sending SMS And Email From Your IoT Device

Pooja Baraskar

6y36.8k28100Article

IoT Email SMSIoT devicePIR SensorUbidotsIntel Edison modulesend SMS email from IoT devicesend sms from email device

28 Comments

Join the conversation! Your thoughts help the community grow.

Bhrigu Chadha10y ago
Can Ubidots send an alert in an android/IoS app?
- Pooja Baraskar10y ago
  Hi Bhrigu, Yes with Ubidots we can send alerts to android and IOS.
Bhrigu Chadha10y ago
Can you please point me to an article that shows me how to create an Android app to detect my ESP8266 device on the wife network? Or Maybe through webapp like how Amazon Tap/Echo does.
- Pooja Baraskar10y ago
  ESP8266 is really cool, I have already implemented this thing. We can make the ESP act as AP to connect to AP. I will blog on that soon.
Bhrigu Chadha10y ago
Thanks for this Pooja.
Sr Karthiga10y ago
Good one
Harshad Pansuriya11y ago
Nice one
Sumit Joshi11y ago
thanks for sharing pooja.
Carmelo La Monica11y ago
Very good Pooja :)
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks Carmelo La Monica :)
Nilesh Jadav11y ago
Great ! You are really innovative person !!
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Pooja Baraskar11y ago
Thanks Ankit Bansal :)
Vinodh Narayanan11y ago
nice share..... good one
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Humayun Kabir Mamun11y ago
Nice...
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Ankit Bansal11y ago
Great Mam, you always give exceptional examples, .. really awesome..
Sujeet Suman11y ago
Nice Article..............
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Santhakumar Munuswamy11y ago
Good show...
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Shridhar Sharma11y ago
nice share..
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks :)
Rakesh11y ago
Good topic Share
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks
Rajeesh Menoth11y ago
Good Article...
- Pooja Baraskar11y ago
  Thanks

Introduction

Phone notifications are a good way to get alerted about any unusual activity. When we are developing an IoT solution it is always good to send SMS to the user’s phone for certain activity as the smartphones are always within reach. It is not always possible for a user to monitor the data with a Mobile app or a website. If they get a notification about a certain activity or a sudden variation in data they will come to know this by time and can immediately check it with the mobile app and can take the further steps.

Earlier sending SMS with a microcontroller was a little clumsy process, you have to create an account on an SMS service provider like Twilio and then you have to use some IoT channels like Thingspeak, Temboo, and IFTTT. Lots of work! But now as the IoT devices are getting powerful, there are some new revolutionary IoT Cloud services that are immerging. They are aimed to take your data to the cloud with ease. One of the IoT clouds recently I am using in my projects in Ubidots. The best thing about Ubidots is, it is user-friendly. It won’t take much time to take your IoT solution to the cloud. Ubidots visualize your data in a better way. You can even track the locations with its GPS widget, all you need is just to send the data with a simple API.

With Ubidots, we can easily configure under what conditions an alert should be triggered. We can set any type of thresholds through a simple "IF-THEN" statements. Once an event is triggered it will send an Email or SMS alerting someone about a specific event or you can perform any other task like trigger another action.

Let us create a simple project with a Burglar Alarm System with Intel Edison which will detect any intrusion and notify you with an SMS or an Email. I am using Ubidot’s Node.Js library and programming in Node.Js with Intel XDK IoT edition.

If you have an Intel Galileo board and programming using Arduino IDE or you want to know more about the PIR sensor and its working have a look at another article of mine “Burglar Alarm with PIR motion sensor”.

Requirements

Intel Edison module
Arduino expansion board
PIR sensor
Buzzer
An LED
USB cable
Power Supply
Jumper cables

Figure 1: Requirements

Making Connections and Programming

Connect your Edison to the power supply and to your PC via USB cable.
It will take 15-20 seconds to boot up, after that stack the Grove Base Shield.
Connect the PIR motion Sensor to analog pin D2.
Connect the Buzzer to pin with PWM, I connected to D5.
Connect the LED to pin D3.
Open Intel XDK IoT edition, if it is not already installed in your PC get it from here.

If you have flashed you Edison with the Flash Lite Tool Node.Js will be already installed on your board.
Connect IDE to your Edison board. It will ask you for username and password, the default username is root with no password.
Select a blank Node.JS template and create a new project.

Figure 2: Create a new project

Code for PIR Sensor

//Load Grove Motion module
var grove_motion = require('jsupm_biss0001');
// Instantiate a Grove Motion sensor on GPIO pin D2
var myMotionObj = new grove_motion.BISS0001(2);
setInterval(function()
{
if (myMotionObj.value())
{
BlinkLED();
melody();
v.saveValue(1);
console.log("Detecting moving object");
}
else
console.log("No moving objects detected");
v.saveValue(0);
}, 1000);
// Print message when exiting
process.on('SIGINT', function()
{
console.log("Exiting...");
process.exit(0);
});

Figure 3: Code for PIR Sensor

Sending Data to Ubidots

var ubidots = require('ubidots');
var client = ubidots.createClient('YOUR-API-KEY');
client.auth(function() {
this.getDatasources(function(err, data) {
console.log(data.results);
});
var ds = this.getDatasource('xxxxxxxx');
ds.getVariables(function(err, data) {
console.log(data.results);
});
ds.getDetails(function(err, details) {
console.log(details);
});
var v = this.getVariable('xxxxxxx');
v.getDetails(function(err, details) {
console.log(details);
});
v.getValues(function(err, data) {
console.log(data.results);
});
}

Creating triggers with Ubidots

Log in to your Ubidots account or you can create one here.
Select the “Sources” tab and then click on “Add Data Source” to create a new data source. Here I have added My Edison.
Once the data source is added we will add our PIR sensor. PIR motion sensor is a digital sensor, it will only detect the motion. It doesn’t detect the distance and number of people. Hence if motion is detected I am sending 1 else 0 to Ubidots.

Figure 4: Add our PIR sensor
Click on the variable and copy the variable ID. Paste this in your code also get your API key My Profile, then API Keys.
Now we will create events. Select the Event tab, click add Event.
Select the data source and Variable. In our case, it is My Edison and PIR Sensor.

Figure 5: Select the data source and Variable
Now it will present you with a simple if-then statement. Here we have to select the value of PIR Sensor and the action to be triggered.

Figure 6: IF - Then statement
We are sending 1 if the PIR sensor detects motion, hence to trigger an action our value should be equals to 1. Press continue.
Now we have to add the trigger, we can send an SMS or an Email, can set another variable or can request a custom URL. Let us select SMS for now.

Figure 7: Select SMS for now
Enter the details like phone number and message to be sent.

Figure 8: Enter Phone number and Message

Figure 9: Enter the details
SMS event will be added with the PIR sensor value equals to 1. A similar way you can add an Email trigger.

Figure 10: Add Event

Figure 11: Enter details

Figure 12: Intrusion Detected

Now we have added an Email and an SMS trigger. Build, upload and run your code on Edison. You will notice data sending to Ubidots in the console. If any motion is detected by the PIR motion sensor it will blink the LED, play the buzzer and an SMS and an Email will be sent to your Phone.

Figure 13: Type text message

Figure 14: PIR Motion Sensor Detects a moving object