Tip of the Month (August 2003)

Sending an SMS Message from a Form via a Cell Phone

This month's tip of the month was provided by Peter Girgis of Aus Navigation.

If your handheld does not have cell phone capabilities, you might be able to connect your handheld to your cell phone (by a serial cable, bluetooth, etc.), and have your Visual CE form send an SMS instant message. This month's tip of the month describes how.

Say you wanted to send the message "Hello World" to (617) 555-1212 using a bluetooth connection to a Nokia 6310i. To do this, you will need to create a Macro Program with 8 steps:

STEP 1, Open the communication channel: COMMUNICATE | OPEN. For a bluetooth connection to the Nokia 6310i, the settings would be COM8:, 57600 baud, 8 databits, 1 stop bit, even parity, XON/XOFF

STEP 2, Define the message format to be text mode SMS: COMMUNICATE | SEND. For the expression, use: 'AT+CMGF=1' & @char(13)

STEP 3, Wait for the phone the catch up: SLEEP. For the expression, use: 1

STEP 4, Define the recipient number: COMMUNICATE | SEND. You need to specify the full international dialing string for the number. For the expression, use: 'AT+CMGS"+16175551212"' & @char(13)

STEP 5, Wait for the phone the catch up: SLEEP. For the expression, use: 1

STEP 6, Send the message: COMMUNICATE | SEND. For the expression, use: 'Hello World' & @char(26)

STEP 7, Wait for the phone the catch up: SLEEP. For the expression, use: 1

STEP 8, Close the connection: COMMUNICATE | CLOSE

These instructions have been tested using a bluetooth connection to a Nokia 6310i. They should also work on a variety of other configurations.