Adafruit FONA 800 for upload of pictures

Hi All,

I am building a remote weather station for an airfield. The project has a few sensors, such as wind speed and direction, and also a small camera (Adafruit Weatherproof TTL Serial). I am looking at a way to get the pictures uploaded to an internet based web-server. The airfield is off-grid, and as such the unit is being powered by a solar charger with a 12V battery. I was planning to use a GPRS/3G chip for data connection and came across the Adafruit FONA 800.

Would this unit be suitable for uploading a picture via HTTP or FTP? The unit will probably only take a picture every 15 minutes throughout the day so as long as it could upload them in that time the bandwidth should not be an issue. The pictures are fairly small (perhaps 50KB).

Any advice before purchase would be good.

Thanks, Tim

Just a bit more info on this - I see the documentation for the SIM808 shows that it supports FTP file upload. To use this it has a function to move a file from storage to memory and then upload that to the FTP server. I am making the assumption that this is the memory of the SIM808 module and not the arduino (as the later has very little working SRAM).

Has anyone tried this function? Not sure of the practicalities of uploading a file from the SD card to the GSM module.

The only other alternative I can come up with would be to load the picture data off the SD card as raw bits and upload them to the FTP server as a stream of segmented streams. A bit more fiddly in terms of the coe but saves the need to move the entire file in to RAM.

I haven’t had time to play with FONA at all, so I know precious little about it. Someone else here might be able to help, but you’ll almost certainly have better luck on the Adafruit forums: https://forums.adafruit.com/viewforum.php?f=54

The closest I could find is: http://ubidots.com/docs/devices/FONA.html

Which is a regular HTTP post. I can’t find any documentation indicating the maximum size of post data.

Thanks for the info. That ubidots looks interesting.

I have done a bit more reading. Looks like the file upload commands require an SD card attached directly to the 808 chip which is not supported by the Adafruit module. No biggie - I think I can pull off what I need to do by uploading in chunks to reduce the memory requirements.

I will take a look on the Adafruits forum. In the meantime I have purchased an 808 module and will have a play around with it.