TI-NSpire SMS Shield

Why and how

It all started in a German class I had. I was talking to a friend, and we said that it could be awesome to send sms with our TI. After one-two months, I started to do some digging and found out about some "shield" that could be snapped into the bottom connector of the nSpire. After googling a bit I found out that a few people actually did research on this, so this is what I did and here are the 4 pins that I'm interested in:

After quickly soldering some wires to it and connecting a FTDI breakout board to it, I reset the calculator, and it started dumping out the boot log, so that told me that this could actually work. Now I need a way to access it in software. I searched a bit and found ndless. It's mainly used to play games, but a full SDK to cross compile c for the nSpire. Next I found the nspire-io lib after testing I found that sending was ok the receiving was a pain due to some compatibility issue with different models of TI. After speaking to the author and some nice peoples on the codewalr forum, I modified the source code and it worked. After re-creating a function, it allowed me to receive data until a newline (\n)

 1char* uart_getsn(char* str, int num) {
 2        int i = 0;
 3        int max = num-1;
 4        while(1 && releasefunc()) {
 5                while(uart_ready() && isKeyPressed(KEY_NSPIRE_ESC)) {
 6                        if(i == max) {
 7                                str[i] = 0;
 8                                return str;
 9                        }
10                        char c = uart_getchar();
11                        str[i] = c;
12                        if(c == '\b'){  i -= 2; }
13                        else if(c == '\r')      { str[i] =0; return str; }
14                        i++;
15                }
16        }
17}

After doing some CAD I had it all working and well. Here are source ode link and cad files: GITHUB

Photos

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