Huawei E220 on Linux for SMS

The E220 as sold by many mobile phone operators has transformed business use of the web. No more is the sales force tied to poor wifi coverage, dial up connections or 56k GPRS speeds. The E200 gives 3G speeds of 7.2 Mbit in a very nice tidy package.

I develop mini computers for use in remote locations. These are used for a number of purposes, but particularily Bluetooth Marketing (www.bluekulu.com). The use of the E200 has allowed me to quickly add in both internet access for the device and now I have SMS working. This will be used to both trigger an action on the computer or indeed let it SMS out reports.

In this short article I explain how to set up the E200 for use as an SMS transmitter and receiver on Linux.

Setting up the E220 for use as a modem to allow 3G on Linux is well documented on the web, but there are a few articles that really made a difference in getting it going for me.

The Irish Penguin » Blog Archive » Getting the Huawei E870 to work on Kubuntu (and Mobile Internet from O2)

NSLU2-Linux – HowTo / AddUsb3gModem browse

However, the SMS side is poorly documented.

I have put together a simple script that can be used to put the modem in the right state and that then launches minicom.

#!/bin/bash
rmmod usb-storage
rmmod usb-serial
mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1
mknod /dev/ttyUSB2 c 188 2
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1003
sleep 10
sudo /home/broadcast/bin/huaweiAktBbo-i386.out
sleep 3 # wait for the USB host to settle down…
sudo minicom

In minicom I used the following settings

Minicom settings
Serial Device : /dev/ttyUSB0
Bps/Par/Bits : 115200 8N1
Hardware No
Software Flow Control : Yes

Once you set these settings as the default, restart minicom. (CTRLA z x)

You are now in a position to send commands to the modem. The general format is AT+Some_Command. Some that will work straigh away are.

AT+COPS=? #get network names

AT+CIMI #Get IMSI Number

AT+CGMI #Get manufacturer name

To send SMS’s you need to put the device in “Text” mode. This is done by sending the following command:

AT+CMGF=1 # Puts the mode in text mode

To send an SMS do the following:

AT+CMGS=”+35386827XXXX”
> 3G Rocks!!!!
CTRL-Z

When you type in the line with the phone number the “>” will come up automatically. Type in your message and when you are finished type in CTRLZ (as in ctrl key and z at the same time).

Good so far? But how about incoming messages. Have no fear, DBTR is here!!!

AT+CMGL=”all” #To get a list of SMS’s type in :

AT+CMGR=0 #get an individual message

AT+CMGD=n #Delete a message where n is the number returned by the list above.

There are quite a few other commands that the Huawei understands. I’ll post them later.

To hangup just do CTRLA x.

I hope this makes using the Huawei a bit easier. Now if anyone can tell me why incoming HTPP requests don’t work on Vodafone Ireland, I’d be happy to hear from them.