PLC Next and Whatsapp

PLCnext Engineer
1

Hello everyone.

I was looking to share the state of industrial processes through whatsapp groups of maintenance teams or something similar.

To achieve this, I found some third party services like Whatsmate that can be programmed in Java, C ++, PHP and other programming languages.

I wonder if any of you have ever tried to send WhatsApp messages with PLC Next or if you have any recommendations to do so. Thanks in advance. FMA

plcncli_sdk_3.png

2

Interesting question. Of course emails and SMS’s are possible, but they are starting to seem a bit old-school. I looked into social media messaging from PLCnext a good few years ago, and at the time I think I found obstacles with pretty much every social media platform I looked at. The one that seemed to hold the most promise was Telegram. (https://core.telegram.org/). Unfortunately I didn’t have time to try anything, but perhaps Telegram is worth considering as a starting point. ~ Martin.

3

Huh, well out of interest I set up a trial account on Twilio, and within a few minutes I managed to send a WhatsApp message from my AXC F 2152 to my phone. Amazing. I just registered my phone in their “Sandbox for WhatsApp”, picked a test message, then copied the resulting curl command (including the authentication token) to the PLC command line. Voila. Some things to note:

                                               * You can only send WhatsApp messages using [pre-approved templates](https://www.twilio.com/docs/whatsapp/tutorial/send-whatsapp-notification-messages-templates), so you would need to get one or more of your own templates approved by WhatsApp.
                                               * It is currently not possible to send messages to WhatsApp groups using Twilio. From their [FAQ page](https://www.twilio.com/docs/whatsapp/best-practices-and-faqs):

2020 05 08 21 36 31 However, this looks like a neat solution. If you end up using something like this in a real-world application, please let us know! ~ Martin.

4

Thanks for your reply. I’ll let you know how it ends. ?

5

HI!

maybe this Telegram App offers an alternative:

“PLCnextBot”

https://www.plcnextstore.com/#/874

6

Hi Daniel, Voltaing, Martin. I hope you are blessed!

I see the last post was 2020.
I have a customer in Zambia. I successfully did the Telegram connection and operation. However, they are insistant on WhatsApp. Looks like I’ll have to build an app with NodeRed
The team here in South Africa, Gottlieb, Jp and Rudy are doing groundbreaking stuff!
Did anybody have any further progress, who can I contact?
Have a fantastic day!