Every couple Saturdays I wake up at a reasonable hour and feel like watching a movie. I know I’ve got something coming from Netflix, but I don’t know if the mail’s come yet. Sure, it would be a good bit of exercise to pace back and forth down the drive to the mailbox to see if it’s come. Or, surely, I have more productive things to dwell on then when the mail will arrive. But, this seems like the perfect opportunity to me to over-engineer an overly complicated solution to the problem.
The idea…
Use a magnetic security sensor on the mailbox door to sense when the mailbox is opened. Sense the open status with a small micro-controller that sleeps most of the time, which then sends the signal back to the house over RF. Also, determine if we actually got something by sensing light levels in the closed mailbox. I’ll put an LED and ambient light level sensor in the middle of the mailbox, and reflective tape on the bottom of the box. Theoretically, the light levels should differ significantly if there’s mail present.
Parts list:
- Magnetic reed sensor (Have a bunch laying around)
- Freescale S08 series microcontroller (because I like BDM debugging mode and I have a bunch of them)
- XBee RF Transceiver (because I want to play with them)
- White LED (Have a bunch)
- Ambient light sensor (Have a bunch)
- Some reflective tape (Cheap)
I think this should be a pretty fun little project that shouldn’t break the budget. More details here when I get around to making the thing!
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