Projects » SMS timer setting

Warning - experimental!

This section of the site provides information about an experimental system for remotely programming timers on your Toppy by sending specially formatted text messages. The information here is historical, and freely available for people who want to implement something similar, but it has been replaced by a new, more sophisticated implementation that's integrated with the rest of the site.

What it does

By sending a specially formatted text message, you can tell your Toppy that you would like to set a timer for a particular time and date; for example, you could record CSI on Tuesday, Channel 5, using a text message like this:

You can set repeating timers too, if you like. At the moment, it's very experimental, and a little technical to set up. But it does work! Ultimately, some of the add-ons that are needed to make a really robust and useful system may require services that it will cost money to provide; at that stage, it may be necessary to make a small charge to help cover running costs. Read more about the commands you can use.

What you'll need

At the moment there are some pre-requisites. You'll need Jag's EPG running on your Toppy, an internet connection and some way of automatically collecting the timer data from the internet and transferring it to the Toppy; for the development, I used an Asus wireless router . The system has been designed to be flexible, and will ultimately support other TAPss and connection methods. You'll find more details under the How it works heading - but if you don't understand this, then it's not for you.

How it works

In summary, text messages are delivered to the server by my text service provider; they're interpreted by a script and entered into a database which stores the sender's id, the original text of the message, and the details of the timer that's been requested, along with whether or not it's been downloaded. Another script can then query the database for information about a user's new timer requests and download it it, in a format suitable for setting timers on the Toppy; this is usually a text file that has to be copied to a specific location and is scanned by a TAP, which then creates the timers from the text file. You can read a technical overview, if you'd like to know more.

The code for this project is freely distributable, provided you retain my credit within it.