GSM / TXT Remote Control Socket

[Sangoma]

Hey all,
I wonder if anyone could help me, I am looking for a product that is a remote power reset unit.

I have two property’s, one in the USA and one in the UK, as I may work for 3 months in each location when I am away I like to keep an eye on my other location with remote CCTV / home control etc, this works perfect and I don’t need to change any of this.

On occasions the broadband router will crash or the cable modem will crash and I cannot log into the locations as all of the control connections are done over an IP connection.

I am looking for a product that is about the size of a time switch that I can put a SIM card into and reboot the power remotely for when the router or cable modem crashes.

At the moment I simply use a time switch and power cycle the unit for 15 seconds every 7 days, and so far this has worked well but I would like something a little bit more sophisticated.

Thanks all.

[Otto-Mate]

Welcome Sangoma

I suffered a similar outage with my home router / CCTV setup when on hols a few years ago. Since that I have a mechanical timer on my router than cuts the power to it for a few minutes every night.

Have you seen this also -

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/New-P...our-Phone.html

M.

[Sangoma]

Welcome Sangoma

I suffered a similar outage with my home router / CCTV setup when on hols a few years ago. Since that I have a mechanical timer on my router than cuts the power to it for a few minutes every night.

Have you seen this also -

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/New-P...our-Phone.html

M.

Thanks for the reply Otto-Mate

I actually have a unit similar to the one you posted, I use it for my alarm systems and CCTV system and it does have the ability to trigger relay at the txt command.

However not been someone who is failure with electrics / relays I was looking for a more compact simplified all in one unit.

I will do a bit more searching see if I can find some wiring diagrams to make my own relay system for remote triggering.

[toscal]

I like your idea of a timer switch Otto-Mate. Simple and effective. Sometimes I think many of us have our home automation thinking caps on for too long and we forget the simple solutions.

[Otto-Mate]

True Toscal! Simple is usually hard to beat

M.

[katman]

The unit Otto mentioned will do exactly what you want with no additional hardware required.

If you want to "roll your own" solution you will need to do one of two things.

OPTION 1
Design and build a circuit to connect to a cellphone and recieve messages via the comm port to operate a relay which would be a completely separate system to your existing setup.

OPTION 2
Depending on what programming skills you have and what hardware you have in your existing automation setup, find some way of communicating with the outside world to regularly retrieve a web page or send a message into your "other" system. If you fail to get the page/message, then assume the router/modem is down and reboot the equipment.

If you go for option 2, I think I would choose to get a page from Google or something similar rather than my other system. Google is far less likely to be down thereby giving false resets. The problem with polling your own remote system is that either one could be down and you might get stuck into a reboot cycle

Hope that makes sense but without knowing what you have in the way of equipment and skills its difficult to suggest anything else.

As others have said, a simple mechanical timer is by far the simplest and most reliable method but would give reboots whether needed or not. The polling method has the advantage that it wouldnt reboot unless something was down and would do it automatically without any manual intervention by you.

[TimH]

I spotted this while looking for something else:
http://www.quasarelectronics.com/vel...-phone-kit.htm

Fairly basic, but cheap, and should do the job? (relay included, and pre-assembled )

HTH,

Tim.

[Quantek]

Quantekshop do a GSM remote control, that will suit your needs you can find more details here GSM Remote Control