Saturday 7 October 2017

SMS for automation



So the power is out or the internet is down and you still want to be able to control or check on your home, how can you do this??

Answer: Pay as you go plan and a old rooted cell phone!

Required Parts:
- Old Android cell phone (You can get a Nexus 4 with a damaged screen cheap)
- Pay as you go plan (7-11 has a great plan which only costs $25 a year and has unlimited inbound texts)
- UPS to keep your PC up and running during a power failure

Step 1:
Root your phone & enable ADB.
There are a ton of guides out there on how to get root access on almost any phone.
You should turn off logging in SuperSU or it will eventually wreck your flash.
Authorize your PC and make sure the shell has always granted root permissions.

Step 2:
Install SQLite and ShellMS APKs linked here since they can be tough to find.
SQLite will be required to read the SMS database and ShellMS will allow you to send texts in the background without user interaction.
I could not find anyone with a copy of the ShellMS APK, I had to compile it myself from source.  I will link it in here so no one else has to go through the trouble I did.

Step 3:
Write up some code to handle messages sent by SMS.

To send a SMS use the following command:
adb.exe shell am startservice --user 0 -n com.android.shellms/.sendSMS -e contact <phonenumber> -e "<message>"

To check the SMS database:
For unread messages only:
adb.exe shell "su -c \'sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db \\"select * from sms where read = 0 order by date asc;\\"\'"

For all messages:
adb.exe shell "su -c \'sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db \\"select * from sms order by date asc;\\"\'"

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