SIM908 development board Review

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this product for free so that I could provide product feedback to the company and post a product review. I was not required to write a positive review and I do not rate products higher than they should have been. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's requirements.

I recently received a SIM908 development board from DIYmall for a product review. In addition to the board itself, two antennas ( GSM and GPS ) were included.  I believe you would need to use a SIM card tied to T-Mobile network or AT&T network if you plan to use this unit in the US.

SIM908 Board

I used an Arduino UNO to connect with the SIM908 dev board, it took me a while to figure out how to use it - apparently you must have a SIM card in the unit, otherwise it won’t fully start up and won’t respond to AT commands.

Once I figured out how to get things connected, I focused on two projects (links are at the end of this entry):

1) Being able to send “AT” commands to the unit so I could play around with different commands.
2) Being able to get GPS information in a NMEA standard format, so that software on my computer could use the data.

Overall, this is a neat little board.  I didn’t get a chance to write any other programs, but the basic capability of issuing AT commands and getting GPS data both worked fine.  I was able to send and receive a sms (text) message which was pretty neat.  This sort of board is going to require that you have a solid grasp of Arduino (or whatever board you are using) and how to interact using AT commands -- not something I would recommend for a new user.

Bottom line: Neat little board to experiment with GSM/GPS capabilities.

Amazon Product Page: http://amzn.com/B00F3AF61K

Here are the Hackster.io projects for Arduino:

AT Commands:
https://www.hackster.io/bigboystoys13/diymall-gprs-gps-sim908-module-at-commands

GPS Data:
https://www.hackster.io/bigboystoys13/diymall-gprs-gps-sim908-module-nmea-data