If you have a mailbox outside your house you might have to look at it many times to check to see if your mail flag is up. Of course this isn’t a very efficient use of your time. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some type of visual indicator in your house that would alert you when the mail has arrived? Wait no longer, Bob from Galactic Studios has built a Smart Mailbox Project that will come to your rescue. He provides all of the build details so you can also build your own. It uses a 16F1825 PIC microcontroller and a reed switches and an IR beam to monitor when the door is open, when there is mail in the box and when the flag is up. Bob shares some of the learning events that he had along the way that lead to some modifications.
I think the next version needs to add more sensors! What about a weight sensor so Bob can know how much mail he has, it could even guess that a weight over a certain preset is a package. I am also thinking with our connected life you need to get some kind of notification on your smart phone that a mail event has occurred. 🙂
Thanks for the tip Jim.
“When the mailman comes and delivers my mail, a toy mailbox inside the house raises its flag. When I go out to retrieve my mail the toy mailbox lowers its flag. If I go out again to put outgoing mail in the mailbox, the toy mailbox is smart enough to know not to raise its flag. If anything goes wrong, like the mailbox door is left open or the battery is low, the toy mailbox waves its flag as a distress signal.”