home mailbox sensor

I normally check my mailbox (snail mail) every day before entering my apartment home mailbox sensor. One day I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice if I know if I have new letters without having to check the mailbox?” That’s how I came up with the idea to install a wireless sensor that will notify me when somebody leaves something from me in the mailbox. The tilt sensor will detect when a new letter arrives and it’s placed in the small cover of the mailbox. It will trigger when the mailbox lid is lifted. Originally I thought of having a light sensor in there, but it was just easier to have an on-off sensor because I only need to recognize these two states mail alert system. The snap-action switch will detect when I open the mailbox with the key (to reset the detection) and it’s placed right where the lock mechanism is resting. The snap-action switch is normally closed and when I use the key and rotate the lock mechanism, the switch will open, thus triggering the sensor. Every time a sensor is triggered, the Arduino will send a message to the coordinator (i.e. another Arduino I have in my apartment also with an Xbee attached). started my prototype based on this post from the adafruit forum. It also provided me with a solution to run the sensor on batteries. Originally I had no idea how to deal with that. The simple setup should not consume a lot of power, but the Xbee could, so the idea from this guy was to cut the Xbee power when it’s not sending anything http://mailboxsensor.com, and only power it up when you need to send something (BTW, that implies one-way communication, which I don’t like since I want to be able to reset the mailbox not only with the key, but also remotely, but I will try to achieve this on a further version of the sensor).

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