How to get robots to send texts?

November 28, 2009 11:13 AM

Interactive art filter - how to get cute robots to send sms messages?

Asking this question for a friend. He's designing an interactive art installation that uses small mobile robots which are infrared tracked by a Wii to trigger events in Pure Data. The next step is to find a way to get Pure Data to send text messages to participants in the project , probably using Frontline SMS. We are both a little tech savvy but not really coders - does this sound workable/do-able? what would be the best way to proceed here?

posted by Chairboy to computers & internet (5 comments total)

pd comes with a command line app called pdrecieve, you can combine that with a tool like this in a shell script to send sms messages for every pd message pdrecieve gets.

You do not mention your platform, so I presumed Windows. For Linux or Mac the shell script would be much easier to write, but I am sure you could do this on any platform.
posted by idiopath at 11:26 AM on November 28, 2009

I realize I may have been too brief above: the [netsend] object in pd sends a pd message to an arbitrary IP/port. the pdreceive program is a standalone that receives pd messages and outputs the text contents. It would be easy to combine these, with something like the above linked sms command line client, in order to launch text messages from pd.

on Linux or OsX you can use smsclient.
posted by idiopath at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2009

Thanks for that idiopath - much appreciated!
posted by Chairboy at 9:24 AM on November 29, 2009

Are you going to post the results here or in projects? Because that would be awesome and I would like to see it.
posted by idiopath at 9:48 AM on November 29, 2009

Will get them posted when it gets done, probably be next summer we think. Thanks for your interest!
posted by Chairboy at 10:27 AM on November 29, 2009