How to approach mobile connectivity to receive calls on RPI?

Nerves Forum Nerves Questions / Help
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I am thinking of building some personal projects on RPI zero w2. I would like to have internet connectivity on the RPI for updates and remote access. I would also like at some point to have the feature of receiving calls, detecting the phone number of the caller.

What hardware do usually people use for such use-cases, and how hard is this to integrate with nerves?

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Maybe this is interesting for you:

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Great video, thanks!

OK, I was looking exactly for a setup like this, as I’ve already worked with SIMx hardware before and usually is easy to find and order those chips online.

A few conclusions on this topic:

  1. Receiving calls is trivial with AT commands, I’ve already done this in the past on a MCU but I need to refresh my knowledge, if I don’t forget I will post how this can be done once I implement it;
  2. Nerves has official support for internet connectivity with vintage_net_mobile, however sadly it doesn’t officially support SIMx family of chips from the looks of README page. It could be also possible that this can be achieved with generic linux drivers as pointed here: VintageNet - A new network configuration library for Nerves - #6 by fhunleth

A part of the problem is out of the way, now the only part left is to investigate what would be the most optimal choice of the modem. @fhunleth mentioned Quectel BG96 and EC25 in the post above, but that post is from 4 years ago, maybe that is no longer the case.

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I replied to your other post. TL;DR - Quectel BG96 and EC25 still work today, but you should be fine with any USB-based cellular modem that supports QMI.

I’ve only been using USB-based QMI modems. My recommendation would be to switch to a Raspberry Pi with more USB ports so you can more easily plug a modem into the board. It is possible to use the RPi Zero 2W’s USB port with an adapter, but I’d highly recommend seeing cellular connect and work well first.

I’ll have to leave it to others to recommend LTE modems that use AT and PPP over UART.

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