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SchoolTool at Maker Faire RI

 

I took the opportunity to present at our local Maker Faire (inspired
by O'Reilly's Make Magazine -- http://makezine.com ) as motivation to
getting a working prototype of a SchoolTool appliance working with
SMS.

My spiel from the show is available in video form here:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/08/schooltool_connects_schools.html

Background on the hardware is here:
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2010/06/schooltoolbox-explained.html

The phone is a Nokia 6021, which is an old model well supported on
Linux.  In terms of the SMS support, there is nothing too
sophisticated going on.  Just a simple Python script written with
PyGSM that polls the phone for new messages, looks for a string
("enrol") asking for total student enrollment.  If it finds it, it
asks the local SchoolTool using a simple http request, and sends back
the result.  Simple, but it does actually work as a demo.

--Tom