I wrote yesterday about a quick hack I did at Over The Air using the BlueVia API. I thought it was worth a quick post to show just how simple it was.
Read yesterday’s post for background to the idea behind the hack, but in essence, what I wanted was:
- monitor the location of my mobile phone
- send an SMS to a different mobile number when my phone goes into a predefined known area
BlueVia provides an API that let me doing this using network operator data. In other words, nothing needs to run on my phone itself as location data is obtained from where O2 thinks my phone is.
This means there is no battery-life impact on the phone for this monitoring.
It also means this will work with any phone – from iPhones and Androids to cheap feature phones.
The whole thing took me less than an hour and needed only 90 lines of Python.
This is how I did it.