Alarm SMS

[KJM]

I really like the rainfall rate alarm in Cumulus, alarm if the rainfall rate exceeds say 5mm/hr. Been thinking about the best way to get this onto my mobile phone as an SMS text. Would I be right in thinking the best way would be to FTP to a web server then write some PHP script to check for the alarm & then access an online SMS facility? If so which cumulus file should I be looking in for the alarm status?

[steve]

You can use the alarm web tags - http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webtags

[daj]

You could use the Cumulus Toolbox. http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Toolbox

Set a trigger to say if a webtag (in this case rainfall rate) exceeds a limit (5mm) then send an email. Most automated SMS facilities has a email to SMS facility.

That would save on the FTPing, PHPing...etc

(Toolbox did have SMS features built in directly but it was to a paid service and the general consensus seemed to be that users would do it another way rather than pay a small charge with a SMS provider)

[KJM]

Thanks Guys, I'm tempted to try the twitter path first Steve because it's already built in without adding the toolbox. From your wiki however it looks like the <#High Rain RateAlarm>tag is sent at a nominated interval as a 0 if no alarm or a 1 if alarmed. Doesn't this mean I would be getting constant 0 tweets till the trip is reached followed buy constant 1s afterwards?
Is there someway to get tweets only when the threshold is exceeded? And is there anyway twitter can translate the zero into a text message like 'rainfall rate alarm"?

[steve]

Doesn't this mean I would be getting constant 0 tweets till the trip is reached followed buy constant 1s afterwards?

The value is '1' until the alarm is manually reset.

Is there someway to get tweets only when the threshold is exceeded? And is there anyway twitter can translate the zero into a text message like 'rainfall rate alarm"?

Twitter is either turned on or off; you'll need to use additional software to achieve all of this. There's a limit to how much of this kind of functionality I can build in; The data is accessible, so it's usually possible to achieve all kinds of additional functions, as David has demonstrated with Toolbox.

[KJM]

The 'Update Interval' in 'General' is how often Cumulus processed your PHP webtag file, so this is how often 'Rules' will be checked in Toolbox.
This time seems to be fixed at 15 mins unlike the System check interval which is editable in a little white box. Is there anyway to reduce the update interval to 5min? If just that I'm checking an alarm webtag & I'd like to get the email as soon as the alarm webtag changes state.

Currently you can be notified each time the event happens, hourly or once per day.
So I choose 'always' if I want notification when the alarm tag toggles?

[daj]

The 'Update Interval' in 'General' is how often Cumulus processed your PHP webtag file, so this is how often 'Rules' will be checked in Toolbox.
This time seems to be fixed at 15 mins unlike the System check interval which is editable in a little white box. Is there anyway to reduce the update interval to 5min? If just that I'm checking an alarm webtag & I'd like to get the email as soon as the alarm webtag changes state.

The update interval is taken from you Cumulus settings and is how often Cumulus processes the webtags file. Toolbox needs to refer to the webtags file, so looking at it more often than Cumulus updates it is pointless.

Currently you can be notified each time the event happens, hourly or once per day.
So I choose 'always' if I want notification when the alarm tag toggles?

Correct

[KJM]

Thanks David, if I set Cumulus to update the webtags file every minute & use push email to my mobile phone I'll have a pretty good approximation to an an alarm event driven system.
Shame you had to pull the SMS facility from your toolbox but I take your point about fees & charges. Do you have any plans to put twitter into the toolbox? If I could just tweet when a rule is satisfied that would be the perfect solution in that it would work for any mobile not just those that are data enabled for emails.

[wawryl]

how to use the toolbox and the mobile connected to a PC to send SMS alert (command AT?) Any ideas? I using now smsmail.com system toolbox sending emails via this system to my mobile. Will be cheaper to use old nokia 5110 and my pre-paid card

AT command
+CMGS - Send message

+CMSS - Send message from storage

+CMGW - Write message to memory

+CMGD - Delete message

+CMGC - Send command

+CMMS - More messages to send

[MickinMoulden]

I really like the rainfall rate alarm in Cumulus, alarm if the rainfall rate exceeds say 5mm/hr. Been thinking about the best way to get this onto my mobile phone as an SMS text. Would I be right in thinking the best way would be to FTP to a web server then write some PHP script to check for the alarm & then access an online SMS facility? If so which cumulus file should I be looking in for the alarm status?

If you have Facebook, can get SMS from there, and don't mind having updates posted there, you can do it that way. Only problem is that when you update Facebook it will only post what is in the Subject matter. Last time I used Toolbox, it didn't matter what alarm was set, the subject was always the same (the message could be customised, but this would not show on Facebook).
Need Toolbox to support sending preformed emails. Then it could send a picture of rain with a personalised and individual subject matter. That would be cool!