Mbas - Mail box alert system

An incoming mail alert system, solar powered and transmitting mail arrival notifications wirelessly to an "inside home" micro base station.

Clovis Fritzen

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Description

The plan here is to develop a permanently supplied (no batteries, only a super cap) incoming mail system. I plan to use a "line finder" sensor to sense for new mail (Ir LED + photodiode); the photodiode would then "wake up" a microcontroller from sleep mode (a teensy LC for example), that would then send a [new mail] message to a base station.
The base (receiving) station will be inside home and will be supplied by the power outlet. A color LED will light every time new mail comes.
There are some hackaday projects with that same objective, and also a couple of U.S. patents:

- https://hackaday.io/project/1954-snail-mail-notifier
- https://hackaday.io/project/1188-you-have-mail
- http://www.google.com.br/patents/US20110234402

My project will be different from all the others when it comes to the supply system for the mail sensor (solar + super capacitor) and the base station (color LED + outlet supply).

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First test - proof of concept
Clovis Fritzen • 06/09/2015 at 02:14 • 0 comments

An incoming mail detection system needs a sensor - I decided to start prototyping with an infrared LED and sensor: the SeeeStudio Grove "line-finder" that I bought here and a Teensy LC that I got from http://hackaday.io some weeks ago (inside a 2015HackadayPrize giveaway!).
It worked just out of the box, using a code that can be found on my GitHub (link in this project page). You can see a video of the first test below: