Proceeding of the 2009 International Conference on Space Science and Communication

26-27 October 2009, Port Dickson, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia

An Automated Remote Messaging System using

GSM Communications
Ahmad Zaki bin Hj Shukor Muhammad Herman bin Jamaluddin
Department of Mechatronics, Department of Mechatronics,
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM),
Karung Berkunci No. 1752, Pejabat Pos Durian Tunggal, Karung Berkunci No. 1752, Pejabat Pos Durian Tunggal,
76109 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia 76109 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia
Email: zaki@utem.edu.my Email: herman@utem.edu.my

Abstract—This paper discusses a method for implementing
Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) control of a
Light Emitting Diode (LED) Messaging Display for advertising
purposes. The existing LED display will be used and integrated
with the custom-built GSM controller board, inclusive of
microcontroller for control and data transmission to the GSM
modem
Keywords-component; Wireless Communication, GSM
Communication, LED electronic display,
For advertising, the brightness of the LEDs and the way it is
displayed or appears, attracts motorists and pedestrians when
they are crossing the road or stopping at the traffic lights.
Where big screen LED Televisions might capture the views of
the people, simple alphabetical electronic moving display has
just enough attraction to relay information to the viewers.
Outdoor LEDs serves the purpose of public and indoor LEDs
are placed inside buildings.

I. INTRODUCTION (HEADING 1)
Light Emitting Diodes (LED) Dot-Matrix digital display has
made its way to the digital world, enhancing advertising,
traffic lights and other display systems. Due to its clear and
bright lights emitted from the LED’s and the way it can be
displayed, such as rolling left, right or other fancy
appearances, it has and is gaining popularity around the world.
Even shopkeepers are using LED displays to attract customers
to have a look at their bargains. It is commercially available in
different sizes, colors, features and lines. Some can even
display graphics alongside alphanumeric.

In some applications, LED displays can even save lives and

avoid accidents, especially road fatalities. When outdoor
LED’s are placed at the right spots, motorists can view their
speed of their vehicles and compare it with the speed limit,
thus alerting the driver to adhere to the speed limits of the road
they are using. Any occurrences of road construction or
repairs, motorists can be alert and change lanes because of the
brightness of the LEDs that can be seen from afar. Motorists
can also avoid traffic jams or at least be ready to face one
when using the mentioned roads. Traffic lights are also using
LED technology, which is brighter than the conventional
lamp.
Fig. 1.An indoor LED electronic display
Fig. 2.An outdoor LED electronic display showing the speed limit
Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) on the
other hand, is world’s most famous mobile platform. Mobile
phones with SIM cards use GSM technology to help
communicate with family, friends and business associates [1].
It has the added value of mobility, easy availability and high
uptime.
Other applications of GSM include access control devices,
transaction terminals and supply chain management. For
access control devices, it enables communication with servers
and security staff through SMS messaging. Complete log of
transaction is available at the head-office server instantly
without any wiring involved and device can instantly alert
security personnel on their mobile phones in case of any
problem. Transactions for purchasing items can also be made
via GSM communication, and the item will arrive at our

978-1-4244-4956-9/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE 11

doorstep. In industrial applications, GSM has been used for
remote robot training, traffic forecasting and monitoring
systems of various applications such as water quality, pressure
sensor and wireless health monitoring [5,6,7,8,9].
The significant advantages of GSM include multiple
remote data collection points, high uptime compared to
landline, internet, large transaction volume in a very short time
and quick installations. Since the introduction and commercial
use of GSM technology, it continues to grow in usage and
applications throughout the world.
II. COMBINATION OF SYSTEMS
Due to the advantages of LED displays and GSM
technology, a merge between these two would give birth to an
advanced and novel application. As a whole, GSM technology
would enhance the feature of the LED display by allowing
wireless remote control of the LED display, thus saving a huge
amount of cost on cabling. This is because the existing LED
display depends on PC connection and requires the operator to
update the advertisement manually by coming to the place
where the advertisements are.
Fig. 1. Diagram of the merged system
Existing cabled connections for LED displays use RS232,
RS485, TCP/IP or modem communication. These
communications methods require multiple connections for
receiving and transmitting data. Some are suitable for short
distance and some can even be used for long and in long
distances, this will inquire more cabling costs.
The challenge for this research is to find the correct protocol
that can be used for communication between the LED display
and the GSM modem. Some researchers use RS485 or TCP/IP
or modem communications. Because of the short distance
between the added GSM controller circuit and the LED
display, this research chooses the RS232 communication
protocol. The GSM controller circuit is stacked inside the
LED display to reduce the mounting accessories and optimize
space.
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Fig. 2. Internal Connections between GSM controller and LED Display
As shown in Figure 2, the connections between the GSM
controller (microcontroller and GSM modem), and the
communication pins of the LED display has to be cross
connected. In other words, the Receive pin from GSM
controller should be connected to the Transmit pin from the
LED display. The Transmit pin from the GSM controller
should be connected to the Receive pin from the LED display.
The Ground pin between these two devices must also be
connected together.
III. ASSEMBLY AND INTEGRATION
Once connections have been established, familiarization
with the communication language of the GSM modem has to
be done. This is a must, because the microcontroller
programming is based on the GSM modem’s language.
Correct commands have to be sent from the microcontroller to
the GSM modem because only then can the microcontroller
process the messages read by the GSM modem. For GSM
enthusiasts, the most common language is the AT command,
and this command set, can be done in two ways, TEXT mode
or PDU mode.
For example, to read a message received by the GSM
modem, the command “AT+CMGR=1” in TEXT mode, can
be sent from the microcontroller to read the message at
location 1 [2]. Via RS232, the message will be sent in ASCII
code to the microcontroller, bit by bit. It is then up to the
microcontroller to process the data. In this research, the data
or message received will be stored in some locations at the
internal Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only
Memory (EEPROM) of the microcontroller. For recovering
the message, the microcontroller has to read from these
locations and send the data in the language understood by the
LED display. Every LED display has different ways of
interacting with the Personal Computer; hence to
communicate with the microcontroller, one has to understand
first the language of the LED display, even though it uses the
same RS232 communication as the GSM modem. The hardest
part of the project is this stage, and consumes most of the
research hour allocation.
The medium of interface between the GSM modem and
LED display is the microcontroller. This is the core
component between the two. Once both languages are
understood, programming can be done on the microcontroller
to test the functionality of both the GSM modem and the LED
display interacting with each other.
 microcontroller.

The microcontroller will wait for any new messages to be

sent to the LED display, and this is realized by waiting for an
alert response from the modem. If there are no new messages,
only the existing message in read only memory (ROM) will be
Fig. 3. Location of microcontroller in the system sent to the LED display.
As seen in Figure 3, the microcontroller stands between the
LED display and the GSM modem. Thus, two RS232
communications must be enabled by the microcontroller. Due
to the limitations of the microcontroller, one communication
uses hardware USART module while the other uses software
UART module. The compiler for the microcontroller allows
the usage of both modules simultaneously in the program, and
solves the problem of communication.

Fig. 4. The GSM modem (right) and the microcontroller board (left) [3].

IV. ALGORITHM OF THE SYSTEM

Since this system only displays messages once an input
from either the Personal Computer or the GSM controller is
detected, the function of the microcontroller is to be at standby
or wait for the occurrence of an input. During the wait, the
LED display will relay the current message, either from the
internal memory of the controller or the input signals from the
PC, if the user uses the PC to update the message. The internal
memory is a read-only memory, thus the user need not fear of
data loss to the previous messages received and stored.
If a new message is detected, the new message must be read
from the modem and stored into the microcontroller’s internal
memory. The new message will be appended to the memory,
and all messages will be displayed, the latest displayed first. A
simple flowchart of the algorithm can be seen in Figure 5.
When the system is started, initialization codes have to be
sent from the microcontroller to the GSM modem. This is to
standardize the format of the messages and settings of the
GSM modem, i.e. baud rate, message alert. Without
initialization, the modem would not be able to communicate
with the microcontroller correctly. This initialization would
enquire some time, thus the microcontroller has to know that
the modem is ready for receiving messages and alerting the
Fig. 5. The main algorithm of the messaging system
As shown in Figure 5, the system will always refer to the
internal memory of the controller for the message display.
This step helps in the case of wanted or unwanted reset of the
microcontroller, as long as the internal memory of the
microcontroller is not damaged. If the controller detects a new
message, only then will the LED display be updated. This
algorithm proved to be a success when implemented with C
programming for an 8-bit PIC microcontroller. The internal
memory proved to be sufficient for the amount of characters
allowed by the LED display, as it limits only to 200 characters
per display [4].
The GSM modem sends out information to the
microcontroller, for example the date and time the message is
received, the location of the message in the GSM memory, the
sender’s mobile number and finally the message that is sent by
the sender. All these information need not be displayed on the
LED display, as what is important is just the message itself.

13
The information from the modem is filtered, so as to only
allow the SMS message to be displayed. Prior to this, the
identification of the sender has to be monitored, only allowing
the known number or administrator to access the system. This
is called Caller Line Identification Presentation (CLIP) and it
serves as a security measure. If any unknown or unauthorized
number accesses the system, the controller will prevent the
message from being displayed. The flowchart is shown in
Figure 6.
Fig. 6. The CLIP system algorithm
After filtering the message, the message is stored in the
Read Only Memory (ROM) of the microcontroller. In the case
of reset, as mentioned earlier, the message is still maintained
in memory. The next stage is to send the message to the LED
display. This cannot be done by simply writing the ASCII
codes of the message through the communication port, and
some initialization codes to the LED display has to be written
to the receiving pin of the LED display.
After the initialization codes has been sent to the display,
then only the message (in ASCII) be sent byte-by-byte, or
character-by-character. In the LED display used, the
termination character for line feed (or end of message) is
0x7F. After success in sending the message, the
microcontroller waits for the next message to be received from
the GSM modem. While waiting, the LED display will
continuously display the message that it has received, only up
to a limit of 200 characters (including spaces).
V. CONCLUSION
The Automated Remote Messaging System is a novel
innovation as it researches on the communication languages
between the devices, namely the GSM modem and the LED
14
electronic display. However, this paper presents the concept
and processes involved in the implementation of the project. It
shows the overall block diagram of the merged GSM and LED
display system and how it is realized in hardware, i.e. physical
connections During assembly, this paper also presented the
location of the microcontroller in the merged system. It also
discusses briefly the overall algorithm of the controller and the
Caller Line Identification Presentation (CLIP) security system.
The LED display used was the Multimedia LED, which has a
limit of 200 characters per display.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Gratitude is expressed for Universiti Teknikal Malaysia
Melaka (UTeM), particularly the Deputy Vice Chancellor
(Research, Development and Commercialization) and Centre
for Research and Innovation Management, for providing the
platform in terms of facilities and equipments and short-term
research grant dedicated to this project. Thanks to the
university for allowing participation in exhibition competitions,
and resulted in numerous medals, national and international.
Thanks to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering for allowing
success to this project. Thanks also to the researchers and
industrial collaborators, Melaka ICT Holdings (MICTH) who
spend their valuable resources, time and money, in completing
this project.
REFERENCES
[1] Applications of GSM/GPRS Modems, Accessed 12 June 2008,
www.ravirajtech.com/Applications_of_GSM_Modem.html
[2] Wavecom modem datasheet, Accessed 6 June 2008,
http://www.goldsunny.com.my/spec/GS35i_GSM_Modem.pdf
[3] A.Z. Shukor, M.H. Jamaluddin, “PJP/2008/FKE/S00456 – Automated
Remote Messaging System (ARMS) Short Term Research Grant”,
Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), 2008
[4] Multimedia LED BRG7X80TC - Multi-color Indoor Display
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