Yeah, all it does is tell me when something is obscuring one of the sensors. I figure anything that gers put in there which is small enough to fall in a way it covers neither isn’t going to be important enough to worry about.
I am vaguely aware AusPost has some kind of service that might inform me of regular mail delivery, but anyone can put stuff in my mailbox not just AusPost. Plus this was a fun project, yeah.
Okay so that is an issue with the ESP32, sure. There are a lot of variants.
So from what I can tell, the ESP32 is the SoC chip and what you usually get is a dev board which has that plus a bunch of power regulation bits, a USB connector and UART so you can easily program it, etc. That part varies mostly by pinout. I.e. Same features, different pin location.
There are also variants of the chip, but those are usually more costly and will be named things like ESP32-S2.
Every one I’ve seen can run off 5v or 3.3v and uses the latter for logic, so if you got yourself an arduino kit and then just bought an ESP32 dev board it would almost certainly work with whatever is in the kit. Both are microcontrollers, not microprocessors, so they tend not to have OSes or screens.
Yeah, of course. :)
Oh interesting. Can you link the detector? I could use that for something else.
Nice idea. Mine has a slot tho, so I couldn’t just do that. Never seen anyone with a mailbox the mailman has to open in Australia.
Hah, fair. It tells me when I have mail.
Nice :)
Huh, that’d be nice…
That`s a nice service. Do you get no mail from other couriers? Or just no important mail?
I went to post it under share your projects, but new users can’t post a lot of embeds or links, so I just posted a link to this post.
Yeah, that thought did occur to me. Drill a hole in the mounting wood below the box, and a channel up the back to hide more of the cable. I might do that some time later, but I’ve already put everything away… :P
When you put mail in the box, unless it’s a REALLY small bit of mail it’ll land so it obscures at least one of the proximity sensors. This then sets the ‘got mail’ statue to ‘on’ in Home Assistant. From there, I have HA set up to send me notifications to go and check the mail.
Before you say so, yes this was a lot of work for something so trivial, but it was fun. Plus I actually get so little physical mail that I can forget to check the mailbox for weeks at a time. Which would be very bad if I got some actually important mail. And actually, that exact thing happened just days after I finished installing the thing. So it has already potentially saved me from a fine.
I’m sorry to say I don’t. :/ You can grab dev boards off aliexpress for cheap, and they’re really easy to play with. Just connect the to your PC via USB to load your initial ESPHome script, and they spring to life. From there you can do basic testing, since they’ll get power from the USB. It’s just a matter of what you decide you want to hook up to them after that. I assume you’re looking for like a hobby kit, like you can get for arduino boards? Something that comes with a bunch of LEDs and I2C components you can fiddle with? Unfortunately I don’t know of any that come with ESP32 dev boards, but I’ll admit I’ve not looked. Sorry.
A shock sensor would be an interesting way to do it, too. :)
Yeah I made an account, any ideas where a post like this belongs?
I haven’t yet. I might have to do that. :)
Thankfully not. The worst I’ve had was some previous neighbours scratching up the back of the mailbox, probably because I had replaced the shitty old one that came with the place with a nicer one that didn’t match the others. Now everyone has the same mailbox I have, I think because the owners of that unit wanted them to look the same so they could sell it easier.
Thank you!
I’m sure there’s stuff I missed out. Like how I got some round rubber grommets to push the wood screws through when mounting the box to the wooden plank. And how the panels were sealed into the housing with silicone. Ah well. :)
I’m glad people seem to appreciate it.
Using HA I can get the status on my dashboard, but it also sends me notifications via the app and Discord.
Whichever you prefer. There is no correct way.