i have a climate control project that is finished and working well, it is a stand-alone system at the moment, I would like to know what hardware I would need to implement in order to be able to make my smartphone to talk to the board via the cloud.
I am using the mega2560 controller.
thanks for any guidance
make my smartphone to talk to the board via the cloud
You are better off making your Arduino talk to the cloud via. your smartphone 
.
One approach is to use a wifi shield/breakout on your Arduino and then setup a wifi hotspot on your phone. The Arduino can then "talk" to the internet via the phone using TCP/IP and most likely HTTP. I think that is the simplest as you don't need to do anything special on your smartphone.
I use an Adafruit ATWINC1500 breakout but there are loads of options available.
dcrash36:
what hardware I would need to implement in order to be able to make my smartphone to talk to the board via the cloud.
davidrh:
You are better off making your Arduino talk to the cloud via. your smartphone
I would have thought that very unlikely, indeed it's about the dumbest idea I have ever heard, but if you have two smartphones, I suppose it's an option....
Assuming that Arduino isn't moving, but you might be, hence the interest in using the cloud in the first place, you might look at the various Internet of Things facilities available. Something like Thingspeak. The advantage of IoT is that there is no needs to get deep and meaningful with your router, indulge in port forwarding, and other hocus pocus. IoT facilities do allow some two-way traffic, but I have only used it order records rather than send commands to Arduino, i.e. just monitoring.
If you have the right router, and are prepared to fiddle with it, that path is open to you and there are threads in the networking section.
Whichever way you go, you may not need anything more than an a standard W5100 Ethernet shield and just a few lines of code. When I used WiFi, I just plugged the Ethernet shield into a WiFi repeater.
I would have thought that very unlikely, indeed it's about the dumbest idea I have ever heard
It all depends on what you want to do. If you assume your Arduino is in a fixed place, then yes a smartphone doesn't make sense. One of my projects is a mobile cricket scoreboard which we take from ground to ground, so the Arduino is mobile. As I am always within wifi range of the scoreboard, the hotspot capability on my smartphone is perfect for sending scores up to a central website in the cloud so that parents who aren't at the game can still follow the scores. The central site could also be used to configure parameters of the scoreboard.
The OP didn't provide a lot of detail on what they were trying to do, and I can see now that you can read it a different way than what I originally did - so perhaps not the right solution in this case, but I think the dumbest idea ever is a bit harsh :).
Im here seeking ur guys' help so gotta take the bashing with a smile and say thank u...I didnt clarify my plan is to have arduino on home network either wirelessly or wired depending on hardware...then just have a mobile android app so I can monitor and control while away if possible...its pretty robust standing alone and dont anticipate needing much intervention from me
Any advice on getting a android gui going for this?
OK, I see now that you don't want to get data to the cloud but want to access your Arduino at home from the internet.
Assuming you have the pretty standard setup of a combine router/modem connected to the internet and your devices (including the Arduino) connected to the router, then you will need to look at port forwarding on your router. This enables you to forward an incoming TCP/IP port on the router to another device and port on your local network.
You need to be careful doing this, as you are now opening that port up to anyone or anything on the internet. Even if you don't tell anybody what the IP address or port is, port scanners will still find it and then have a way in to your network.
dcrash36:
Any advice on getting a android gui going for this?
A couple of choices. You can write a native app using the Android SDK or you can write a HTML 5 responsive app and deploy it on a server.
The native app can take advantage of all of the features of Android, but will only run on Android.
The HTML 5 app runs in the browser and can use some of the most common features of a smartphone, and will also run in a normal browser as well. You can make it work on Android and iPhone if you design it right. You also need to have access to a server to run it on - most likely from a cloud provider like AWS.
The choice depends on the user experience that you want and the skillset that you have available.
Atwinc1500 looks like a good place to start...thank you and adafruit io looks exactly how I envisioned the gui
dcrash36:
plan is to have arduino on home network either wirelessly or wired depending on hardware...then just have a mobile android app so I can monitor and control while away if possible...
No problem, what you are saying is what I understood you said - remote monitoring. If you use an Internet of Things facility you need no more than a shortcut to their site on the browser in the phone and everything is done for you. No GUI or any other app required. Arduino wraps up the data in the approved manner and puts it on the IoT site at regular intervals, you log on to the same site when you take a break from surfing in Bali, and see a graph of recent events back home.