Planet Arduino

If you’re waiting for a much sought-after letter, checking your mailbox every five minutes can be a roller-coaster of emotion — not to mention time-consuming. If you fall into this trap, Hackaday.io user [CuriosityGym] as whipped up a mailbox that will send off an email once the snail-mail arrives.

The project uses an Arduino Uno, an ESP 8266 wifi module, and an idIoTware shield board — making specific use of its RGB LED and light dependent resistor(LDR). Configuring the RGB LED on the idIoTware board to a steady white light sets the baseline for the LDR, and when a letter is dropped in the box, the change in brightness is registered by the LDR, triggering the Arduino to send off the email.

They used a service called IFTTT — If This Then That — to set up the email process, but feel free to use whatever is most comfortable for you. Be sure to insulate your board properly if you have a metal mailbox! Or, forego the standard letter receptacle and build the smartest mailbox you may ever see.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, home hacks

[Felix Rusu's] mailbox is on the other side of the street and he’s got a pretty big front yard. This means checking for mail is not just a pop your head out of the door type of activity. This becomes especially noticeable during the winter months when he has to bundle up and trudge through the snow to see if his letter carrier has been there yet. But he’s made pointless trips a thing of the past by building a notifier that monitors the mailbox for him.

He’s using a Moteino, which is an Arduino clone of his own making. It’s tiny and features an RF module on the underside of the board which takes care of communicating with a base station inside the house. The module seen above rolls the microcontroller board up along with a 9V battery and a hall effect sensor which can tell if the mailbox door is open or closed. When the Arduino detects a change to that sensor it pushes some data back to the base station which then relays the info to a computer or Raspberry Pi in order to send him a text message. All of this is shown off in the video after the break.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, lifehacks

Finalmente dopo non so quanto tempo ho deciso di riorganizzare i miei Feed RSS, che al momento erano buttati a casaccio in Mail. Ho provato a cliccare qua e là ma alla fine mi è toccto cercare in Google e l’ho trovato. In Leopard (10.5) possiamo organizzare i nostri Feed in cartelle come nella sezione [...]