I have an idea for a project, but I have never tried any of this arduino stuff, so I don't even know if this is what I need or not.
Basically I need to have a thing that can probe various sensors and devices via bluetooth and then submit data to the cloud via 3g/4g. It should also be able to receive and send SMS for controlling it. It will also monitor (on way or another) whether there's electricity in the wall outlet, so it has access to electrical grid (but needs a battery, too, to send an alert about the outage).
I am a backend dev IRL so coding and cloud access I can manage.
My question is more this: Should I get an arduino board for this, or should I grab an older android phone and write software for it? I haven't done that either, I'm backend dev, not frontend, but this would be good learning either way.
If you think that an arduino board is better, which board would you recommend?
if you already have sensors communicating via BLE using a Android would seem a good idea. You could implement a program to read the sensors then send SMS text and data to the cloud.
Well, an Android phone has battery-backup built in, so that would be a good start.
If you want phone connectivity for an Arduino, you need a 4G phone modem to go with it, so that is adding complexity, power supply and interfacing problems.
If you want WiFi connectivity, you use an ESP8266 instead of an Arduino.
Good point! Most of the devices and sensors that I have in mind have BT connection and open source codebase, so it shouldn't be impossible.
But I just realized that I haven't thought one part, which is to monitor if a certain door is left open or not. Could be built by using a magnetic switch etc, but what is the smartest way to connect it to the android phone? On the other hand, the android phone has lots of the hardware capabilities and I have old phones sitting unused, so using a phone would make sense moneywise, too.
Yeah, a phone would have a lot of the hardware requirements in it already, and that hardware is free, since I have old phones sitting around not being used anymore. The area doesn't have any other way to connect to the internet other than 3g and poor 4g at the moment, and that's not changing in the near future either.
