OK, let me give you a few ideas. Keep in mind I am not a programmer type. If I had to earn a living programming I would starve to death and the house would be gone.
I wanted something simple to send mail and text notifications of an alarm status. I found no easy way to do it from within VB or most common languages so I took a round about method that works fine. I wrote a script to send mail (as well as text) as a simple script using VBS Visual Basic Scripting which will run on any Windows OS. The script looks like this:
Code:
Set objMessage = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
objMessage.Subject = "Example CDO Message"
objMessage.From = "me@my.com"
objMessage.To = "0123456789@vtext.com;me@myemail.com"
objMessage.TextBody = "This is some sample message text."
'objMessage.AddAttachment "C:\Users\Ron\Pictures\Biscuit\B3.jpg"
objMessage.Send
This is called a CDO message using CDO Object. A Google of Send Mail CDO will bring up a dozen hits with the above code. There is no limit as to what you can build on it. So if you want to try something copy and paste the above code into Notepad and edit it accordingly.
objMessage.From = "me@my.com" You can put any email in there, really matters not.
objMessage.To = "0123456789@vtext.com;me@myemail.com" The first part would be the ten digit phone number (obviously I am in the US) and the @vtext.com is the code used for my cellular carrier (Verizon). Then we have a separator ; followed by a valid email address.
objMessage.TextBody = "This is some sample message text." This will be the text body of the email. Something like Smoke Detector Alarm or whatever you choose.
'objMessage.AddAttachment "C:\Users\Ron\Pictures\Biscuit\B3.jpg" This is remarked out in the sample but it would be used to send a file attachment. Could be a picture as shown or text document or whatever you want as an email attachment. I was experimenting sending pictures of one of the dogs.
objMessage.Send This just sends the email.
I suggest just for the heck of it you give that a try. Copy and paste the code sample after editing it into Notepad. Then save the file but you need to save the file with a .vbs file extension or in Notepad it will save as a useless text document. So you could name it SendMail.VBS and just save to your desktop for convenience. Now once saved double click the icon on the desktop and see if you get mail.
It should work. Well on any computer with an Internet connection anyway.
Now if you think about it you could create a bunch of these files such as FIRE.VBS, SMOKE.VBS, FLOOD.VBS, PWRFAIL.VBS and whatever. Then place them in a folder wherever you want.
Next with that done you need some sort of hardware device out there. Likely for a netbook, maybe a USB DIO (Digital In Out) device. There are literally hundreds of devices out there.Depends on how many digital inputs you want for alarms.
Now you write your real software to communicate with your DIO device. I used VB because for me Visual Basic (NOT VB Scripting) as I used earlier is simple and when you are not a programmer simple is a very good thing.
I set all my DIO ports as Inputs and all low. The software just keeps looking at the ports. If a port goes high it creates an alarm status for that port. Then depending on which port goes high my code in VB looks like this:
Code:
Private Sub Text1_Change()
If Text1.Text = "Alarm" Then
Shell "Wscript.exe C:\Users\Ron\Desktop\sendmail.vbs", vbNormalFocus
End If
End Sub
I have text boxes with "NORMAL" as text and a Green background color. For an alarm condition the text changes to "ALARM" and the background color changes to red. So if my text box text = Alarm Then I run a shell command to automatically execute the .VBS file and send mail and text to my cell. If you wrote more .vbs files the software would open the correct file for any given alarm condition.
There are likely a dozen ways to do this. I am just mentioning what I did. Try the first script and see if it runs on your system.
<EDIT> If you wanted to start a process from within a C# program your code would look like this example:
A C# program can launch another program using the Process class. The Process class is part of the System.Diagnostics namespace. You start another program by instantiating a Process object, setting members of it's StartInfo property, and invoking it's Start() method. Listing 1 shows how to start a process from C#.
Listing 1: Starting a Process: ProcessStart.cs
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
namespace csharp_station.howto
{
/// <summary>
/// Demonstrates how to start another program from C#
/// </summary>
class ProcessStart
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Process notePad = new Process();
notePad.StartInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe";
notePad.StartInfo.Arguments = "ProcessStart.cs";
notePad.Start();
}
}
}
When the program in Listing 1 runs, it will open the Windows (TM) notepad application in editing mode on the ProcessStart.cs file. The first thing the program does is instantiate a Process object called notePad, an identifier that happens to have the same name as the program that will be executed, as follows:
Process notePad = new Process();
Next, we specify what program will be executed. This happens by assigning the program name to the FileName member of the notePad Process object's StartInfo property. Here's the line from the code:
notePad.StartInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe";
The StartInfo property also has a member called Arguments, which is used to specify command-line options that are passed to the program. In the following example, the string ProcessStart.cs is passed as an argument, so the notepad application will know what file to open when it is executed:
notePad.StartInfo.Arguments = "ProcessStart.cs";
The program is then executed by invoking the Start() method, as shown here:
notePad.Start();
The results of this program are the same as if the instructions below were typed on the command-line:
C:>notepad ProcessStart.cs
The C# example taken from here.
</EDIT>
Ron