I always wanted to read SMS messages from my Huawei modem on Linux but unfortunately It seems that they only support Microsatan Winblows...
Anyway, while I was trying to read /dev/ttyUSB2, I was connecting a usb gadget with serial over usb, I got a of bunch of gibberish messages, I found out, beside the fact that the usb gadget didn't work :D, that the Huawei supports serial over usb ! it also seems that I have been in a cave, hence the bad reception, because people have been playing with this for decades :)
Cool I can finally read the messages without playing solitaire !
Huawei AT commands
While the modem is connected it keeps sending statistics which include the connection duration, upload/download rates and signal strength:
DSFLOWRPT:000054F0,00000622,00000D89,00000000006FD555,00000000017D4579,0000BB80,0000FA00 DSFLOWRPT:000054F2,00000000,00000000,00000000006FD555,00000000017D4579,0000BB80,0000FA00 RSSI:4 DSFLOWRPT:000054F4,0000001F,0000007B,00000000006FD594,00000000017D466F,0000BB80,0000FA00 RSSI:4 DSFLOWRPT:000054F6,00000000,00000000,00000000006FD594,00000000017D466F,0000BB80,0000FA00
It also supports a subset of the AT commands, I googled for Huawei AT commands, It seems that every model (or perhaps Vendor) supports a different set of AT commands, but "they" don't publicly provide this information !
Anyway, most of them support dialling numbers, notifications, reading/sending SMS messages... Which means that you can easily turn your machine into an SMS gateway ;) !
I'm only interested in a subset of the commands:
AT+CMGF=1 AT+CSCS="UCS2" AT+CMGL="ALL" AT+CMGS="phone number" "message" <ctr+z>
The first command, enables the text mode for other commands, second one sets the encoding to UCS2, I set it to UCS2 to unifiy all the output from the Huawei so I can parse both English and Arabic messages, but there are other options try AT+CSCS=?.
The third one retrieves the list of messages and the last one sends out an SMS, but I haven't tried this one because I didn't have any credit left :)
Python Script
After a some attempts with minicom and ipython, I quickly put together a small python script to read the SMS messages, it's crappy but it works:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import serial
port = serial.Serial(baudrate=115200, port='/dev/ttyUSB2', timeout=5)
port.open()
port.write('AT+CMGF=1\r\n') #set text mode
port.write('AT+CSCS="UCS2"\r\n') #set encoding to UCS2
port.write('AT+CMGL="ALL"\r\n') #get all messages
def __decode(str):
ustr = u''
str = str.strip().replace('"', '')
for i in range(len(str)):
if not i % 4:
ustr += unichr(int(str[i:i+4], 16))
return ustr
gotmsg = False
while(1):
line = port.readline()
if line.startswith('+CMGL'):
info = line.split(',')
print 'message#%s from %s date %s time %s %s' \
%(info[0].split(':')[1], __decode(info[2]), \
info[4], info[5], __decode(port.readline()))
gotmsg = True
if gotmsg and line.startswith('OK'): break
Damn it ! more bills :(
message# 7 from 1011161051159710897116 date "10/07/23 time 16:59:55+12" عميلناالعزيز:نحيط سيادتكم علمابضرورة سدادفاتورتكم خلال48ساعة نظرا لانتهاء موعد message# 8 from 1011161051159710897116 date "10/07/23 time 16:59:55+12" www.etisalat.com.eg استحقاقها وذلك لضمان استمرارالخدمة,كما يمكنكم السدادعن طريق موقع اتصالات message# 9 from 1011161051159710897116 date "10/07/23 time 16:59:55+12" في حالةالسداديرجى تجاهل الرسالة
