Tools: Cellular Emulator and Fake RIL

Today I had the chance to fiddle with the cellular emulator and try a few things with it. Its a very useful tool to test out all your radio related applications (which use RIL directly or indirectly) without having the actual hardware.

Cellular emulator  is very well documented so I don’t want to repeat the same things here, for more information visit the following link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb158495.aspx

In short, you can simulate MO/MT calls, send and receive sms’s and do data sessions as well.

And that is when I came across Fake RIL. Well, I had heard about fake ril before and had a fairly good idea about what it was but never truly had the chance to play with it. I dug down a little deeper today and found it amazing. Basically, as the name suggests, it is a fake ril driver which simulates the network too.  It is so well documented (it ships with AKU so I cannot shell out the docs here bacause of the NDA) and I really appreciate the idea and the brains that went behind designing it. Fake ril simulates the network and all the clients above can work as is, well, that was the whole idea in the first place (:

I had a windows mobile professional device so I thought I might try to make the device use Fake RIL instead of our customised ril which it was using. I built it into a dll and made the device load fakeril instead of the OEM ril driver that it was loading before.  When the device booted up it came up with full signal strength and that is when I noticed that there was no SIM in the device! It worked. I tried making calls and sending a few sms’s and it worked perfectly. When you make a call the call is automatically answered, and there are some special numbers which simulate busy, unanswered, reject etc. If you’ve read the above link you know already.This is a great way for some of our sibling teams to test their applications as there is no dependency on the radio hardware, waiting for the radio code to stabilize et al. I couldn’t try data session though. Will try it out next week.

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