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The Adafruit FONA Mini Cellular GSM Breakout SMA version could put your next project in touch with the world. Send and receive SMS messages and GPRS data, make and answer phone calls, and listen to FM radio. In fact enough functions to build a working phone, including driving a vibration motor and recharging a LiPo battery from the USB power. The board needs a microcontroller to drive it and will work with anything that can send and receive serial data, from an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi. Adafruit's example wiring uses only 4 x microcontroller pins, though you can probably get by with just Tx/Rx. Adafruit have a FONA tutorial which demonstrates how to wire them up and interact with them using the AT command set from a serial terminal. While you're developing your application you can use a serial terminal to send commands and get responses so that you can see exactly what's happening.
Supplied as a fully assembled board plus a 1 x 16 strip of 0.1in. male header pins for you to solder as required. You will also need a microcontroller with a serial UART (3 to 5V compliant), a 2G mini SIM card (15 x 25mm) to connect to a mobile network, a LiPo battery, a micro-USB cable to charge the battery and an external antenna with an SMA connector.
Use mobile voice, text, SMS and data in your next project
SMA antenna connector version
Add a headset or speaker & electret mic for voice calls
AT serial command interface
3 to 5V power and logic compatible
Adafruit part no. 1963
*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.
Q. Does this device have to have a battery attached for it to work or can it be powered by the micro USB or the pin outs on the edge connector???
A. Hi Ian, thank you for your question. The unit is designed to be portable from battery power with the micro USB suitable only for charging the battery, but they do supply a standard USB cable to power the unit from a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone that is connected to the header pins; please see here.