I got to attend Amanda Ervin’s developing for cellular networks workshop at the Radical Networks Conference. We used the adafruit FONA cellular break out board and sent some initial texts!
Working with the board requires using the FONA arduino library. It was a little tricky to get all the pinouts right, and the board communicates at a different baud rate than the serial we’ve been using in class. But in the end it was a pretty simple way to create a cellular device, and I learned a bit about how antennas work in the process. It would be cool to experiment with other AT commands in the future, since we didn’t get to experiment too much with this. Instructions for the arduino test I did are also available on the adafruit site.