Need an SMS to parallel printer driver - any thoughts?

[iamwhoiam]

Need an SMS to parallel printer driver - any thoughts?

I have myriad old mobile phones and a very very old, sturdy ICL Microline 83A printer which works superbly. I want to send an SMS to a phone, and have it print out on the dot matrix printer. I do NOT want to involve PCs whatsoever, and need to make this as simple as can be.

Do any of you have any simple suggestions? Thank you

[baljemmett]

I have myriad old mobile phones and a very very old, sturdy ICL Microline 83A printer which works superbly. I want to send an SMS to a phone, and have it print out on the dot matrix printer. I do NOT want to involve PCs whatsoever, and need to make this as simple as can be.

A lot of phones support AT commands to query the SMS inbox; afraid I don't have any references to hand and would rather go to bed than Google them just now, but you should be able to turn something up pretty easily (I think AT+CGMR rings a bell).  I would imagine a small microcontroller would be able to do the job for you nicely; sit polling the phone for new messages and squirting them out to the printer as required.

Having built a RS232-to-parallel converter around a PIC16F689 before, I'd probably just advise making sure the phone you choose supports hardware handshaking on the serial port so you can tell it to hold fire when the printer asserts the BUSY line.  Apart from that it should be pretty straightforward!

[Psi]

What you want is an old Nokia with F-Bus (M-Bus may work too)

1) Wire up a avr/pic UART (with some 5v-3.3v uart leveling) to the nokia bus pins. (you will need a crystal on the micro, internal osc wont be fast/stable enough for 115200 baud)

2) Configure the micro UART to the baudrate for the bus type used. F-bus is 115,200bps, 8 data bits, no parity, one stop bit

3) Send a string of 0x55 ('U') 128 times (this syncs the nokia to the 115,200 baud clock)

4) When the phone receives a sms it automatically sends the data out the bus. So all you need to do is unpack the 7bit text into 8 bit ascii.

This website has all the nokia bus info and shows which gold pads are the bus lines http://www.embedtronics.com/nokia/fbus.html

I'm not too sure how dotmatrix printer coms work, but if they just print raw 8bit data you might be able to do away with the microcontroller if you can build a 7bit to 8bit unpacker using logic gates.
Then let the phone send the entire sms frame through some unpacking logic to the printer itself. You'd get some formatting data, the phone number and the message.