Just recieved the Cinterion® Connect Shield today. I found it provides "ON/OFF" pin so it's possible to control ELS61 boot from a embedded system. This inspires me to test it on a Raspberry Pi (RPi).

The hardward part is easy, just use a male-to-female jumper leads to connect the "ON/OFF" pin on the Connect Shield to a GPIO on RPi, and an USB cable to connect with each other. I choose GPIO25 for toggling the "ON/OFF" pin.

The finished product will look like this, but still need some minor scripting to configure/setup the Connect Shield.

Here I utilize my previous work for a Wi-Fi Hotspot router project, I copied the chat script used to configure ELS61 WAN port, and stored them to "/etc/chatscripts/els61-eth-on.chat" and "/etc/chatscripts/els61-off.chat".

The content of /etc/chatscripts/els61-eth-on.chat is 

TIMEOUT 60
READY-AT\r\n-OK At+CPIN?\r\n
READY-AT+CPIN=0000\r\n-OK ""
OK AT+CGDCONT?\r\n
IP-AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","INTERNET"\r\n-OK ""
OK AT+CFUN?\r\n
1,0-AT+CFUN=1\r\n-OK ""
OK AT+CMEE=2\r\n
OK AT+COPS?\r\n
0,0-AT+COPS=0\r\n-OK-AT+COPS=0\r\n-OK ""
OK AT+CSQ\r\n
OK AT\^SWWAN=1,1\r\n
OK AT+CGPADDR\r\n
OK 

The content of /etc/chatscripts/els61-off.chat is

SAY "Turn-off Cinterion Modem"
"" AT\^SMSO\r\n
OK  

And the setup for corresponding WAN port interface for Raspbian is

# Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:
source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
  pre-up /usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/chatscripts/els61-eth-on.chat -v  < /dev/ttyACM0 > /dev/ttyACM0
  down /usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/chatscripts/els61-off.chat -v < /dev/ttyACM0 > /dev/ttyACM0

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
  address 192.168.42.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  post-up iw dev $IFACE set power_save off 

To turn-on the Connect Shield, one can use a simple python script to toggle the GPIO 25. Here is how I do it and you can store this script in /usr/local/bin/els61_on.py on the RPi

#!/usr/bin/python

from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep

els61 = LED(25)

print "Turn-on ELS61..."
els61.on()
sleep(1)
els61.off() 

Please remember to use "sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/els61_on.py" to mark it as runnable.

You can then put a line on the /etc/rc.local to to call this script and trigger ELS61 booting up with the RPi, or add a service file to Raspbian's /etc/systemd/system/ directory to autorun the python script on boot using systemd. Here is the content of my /etc/systemd/system/els61-on.service

[Unit]
Description=Turn On ELS61
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/els61_on.py
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target 

The permission of the file ***** to be set to 644:

sudo chmod 644 /lib/systemd/system/els61-on.service 

Now you can configure the systemd to start it during the boot sequence:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable els61-on.service 

Reboot the Pi and your custom service should run :

sudo reboot -h now 

After RPi booted up, you can check the status of your service using :

sudo systemctl status els61-on.service 

Or checking the LED on Connect Shield, if it gives off *** brightness, it's booted-up.

You can use ifconfig to check if eth1 get an IP or not, if everything is OK, you should see similar result:

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:11:12:13:14  
          inet addr:10.35.106.133  Bcast:10.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2c06:6943:11d5:c018/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2955 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:5658 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:813771 (794.6 KiB)  TX bytes:503643 (491.8 KiB) 

Now your RPi 4G CAT1 connection is ready to use.