I found an old ericsson chatboard yesterday, which is a small pocket sized keyboard which would connect to old ericsson phones to make SMSing and WAPing easier. I think it would be a fantastic addition to a project (of which I haven’t yet thought up) and I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with interfacing with something like this. I haven’t been able to dig anything up on the web as of yet.
I have been playing with a chatboard and Arduino. Unfortunately, I never got it to work. Your experience might be different though, I think my electronics knowledge (better: lack of…) is probably the cause of that.
Please realize that there are 2 versions of the chatboard (CHA-01 and CHA-10), I can’t remember the differences, but you will find them if you look for it or in the pages mentioned above.
Well I have had some success already, so full connectivity looks promising. Just connected the transmit cable from the chatboard and I am recieving the “AT” command, which from what I have read, will need to have “OK” sent back at it.
The 3V signal from the chatboard is obviously being read OK by the arduino which is good beacause I didn’t want to stuff around to boost it up to 5V. I am cautious about just hooking up the transmit line directly to the chatboard though so I’ll have to use a resistor divider or zener. Will keep posted…
OK, it looks like this isn’t going to be easy at all. I am recieving input from the chatboard, but it’s all nonsense I get a long string of characters for each key press, I should be getting a simple AT*EKSE=192 like message after every key press but I get something like ATQO**&%^%#^^@&^&*^.
It may have something to do with software serial which I am using. As there is no buffer, it seems impossible because I have to send the “OK” after every recieved string, which is messing up what I am recieving.
I have also tried sending the “OK” after a short delay after recieving the “A” to allow for other characters but it seems the millis() command which I used, is also too slow to work inbetween recieved characters.
Finally, some success. I have been able to interpret the row of numbers. It’s not much but it’s a start. If anyone else has one of these chatboards, I beg of you to try and see what you can do. As they say in Tasmania, two heads are better than one.
BTW: just used a resistor divider to go from 5V to 3V TTL, worked fine.
Here is the code I used for this:
#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
#define rxPin 7 #define txPin 6 #define ledPin 13
// set up a new serial port
SoftwareSerial mySerial = SoftwareSerial(rxPin, txPin);
void setup() {
// define pin modes for tx, rx, led pins:
pinMode(rxPin, INPUT);
pinMode(txPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
// set the data rate for the SoftwareSerial port
mySerial.begin(9600);
Serial.begin(9600); //Opens serial port with data rate of 9600bps.
Serial.flush(); //Clears serial port.