I remember when I got my first mobile device… a pager. Like many kids who grew up in the ‘90s I wore that pager proudly on my belt. Over a decade later I still miss getting a “911” message from one of my friends and rushing home to call and see what happened. In case you’re wondering, most often I got those messages when someone had gotten a sick new Magic the Gathering card or heard the new Get Up Kids single on the radio. Lately, I’ve been feeling particularly nostalgic. I started wondering if I could recreate that glorious device using hardware I have laying around my house. Thanks to the power of Arduino I did it! Today I’m going to show you how to build your very own pager using Arduino and Twilio.

Our Tools

In order to build our super rad new pager we’re going to need a few supplies:

Arduino Uno – The Uno is one of the most popular microcontrollers around and we’ll be using it for our project.

Grove Base Shield – This shield will make it a bit easier for us to wire up our LCD.

Grove RGB LCD – We’ll use this to display incoming messages.

Arduino IDE – You’ll be using this to write the code that will run on the Arduino.

Node.js running on your local machine

Twilio Account – sign up for free!

Hello Hardware

Let’s start by assembling our hardware and displaying a hello world message on our LCD screen. First, plug the grove baseboard into your arduino:

Wire the I2C connection to your LCD: Plug your Arduino into your computer via the USB port and launch the Arduino IDE. Use the example Hello World code provided for the LCD: