Rockblock for newbie

A friend has bought a Rockblock + to use on his boat in the Pacific. I’m trying to make it a bit more user friendly for him and his family to contact each other. He finds a terminal emulator a little “techy” to use, but if I could find something where he could load a script or line by line command then he could be ok. (Putty doesn’t seem to give an option to reuse the buffer commands). Sending to the Rockblock is also an area I would like to help improve for his family. I have tried various options from his website but with Wordpress and PHP and the fear of hackers XSS I am unsure. Obviously the family could learn to use the Rockblock web access but then it gives many people access to his account. So I am looking for any recommendations on where to start,any preferred languages and and something fairly easy for me to learn and programme up for him. Unfortunately I am a complete newbie but willing to learn. They have a Raspberry Pi onboard as well but aren’t using that to full potential yet either. Thanks in advance !

Hi teegee777,

While I do not have a straight-forward answer or application to point you to, I do have some resources that can help point you in the right direction for simplifying communication using the RockBLOCK. First, just in case you have not read through it, the

[RockBLOCK Documentation Page is going to be the most complete set of documentation for all things RockBLOCK. Beyond just the AT Command set, they also have a Node.js library and Arduino Library if you want to take a look at those. They are linked in the “Further Reading” section of that documentation page. You could use either of those libraries to simplify things by scripting commands based on simple inputs from the user. The Arduino library has some good documentation on the page linked from Rock Seven’s documentation page.

Another resource they recommend is [Makersnake. That is a RockBLOCK enthusiast’s blog with some sample projects and information on using the RockBLOCK so he may have some good ideas for your project as well.

Finally, if you are still searching or need further help after checking out these resources, you may want to try contacting

[Rock Seven’s Support.

Sorry we do not have a direct answer for this question but hopefully, these resources help point you in the right direction for this project.](http://www.rock7mobile.com/support)](http://makersnake.com/)](https://docs.rockblock.rock7.com/docs)

Thanks for your reply and links to the information. I guess one of the things I was looking for was some direction on which programming languages would be useful to learn. I’ve already seen that PHP on the website could be easily hacked and as a newbie I didn’t want to open myself to some of that. It seemed to be good that as they already had a website for the boat, that friends could sign in to the website and post some short messages to them. So is it worth learning java, python for the web end or are there any other short scripts code to receive input and send to Rockblock core? There has to be a ASCII to Hex decode first before sending to Rockblock. For the boat end, they have Pi and I have downloaded Makersnake but haven’t got hold of the Rockblock yet to investigate further. I was looking for a “free” terminal emulator which could store previous commands so that they could be resent, or to be able to send a script,as yet I haven’t discovered one for a windows laptop on board.

Since you’re pretty new with programming and it’s probably going to take a while to get up to speed on that, plus write your code and test everything, it might be better for you to go with an off the shelf satellite messenger device that already runs on the Iridium network. Have a look at the options below as it might end up being less expensive and a lot less hassle than trying to build your own solution.

  • - [[SPOT X](https://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=666)
  • - [[Garmin inReach Mini](https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/592606#overview)
  • - [[Iridium GO!](https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-go/)
  • [/list]

    You’d still need to do some work if you wanted to integrate it with a website, but the device will work all on it’s own plus these are capable of sending a SOS message if you needed rescue. You probably don’t want to rely on a home made device to save your butt if something goes wrong and you need help.](https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-go/)](Garmin inReach® Mini | Hiking GPS | Satellite Communicator)](https://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=666)