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Mail delivery Notifier V1

Using a tilt switch to get an email when the mail comes.

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Using a tilt switch to detect when the mail box door opens seems like an easy way to know when the mail gets delivered. I'm planning on reusing my garage door left open notifier circuit, by just moving the tilt switch out on a set of wires and attaching it to the door. Switch closed = door is closed, switch open = door open and mail is delivered.

The goal for this project is to get an email when the mail is delivered.

By reusing my garage door left open notifier circuit board, this gets a lot easier. Originally when I made my garage door circuit, the wifi chip would periodically wake up and check the state of the tilt switch, about every minute. That worked okay for the garage door, since I figured I wouldn't be opening and closing it very fast, but that wouldn't work for this project, the state of the tilt switch changes too quickly. But with my most recent version of garage door state detection, I use a smaller microcontroller that pulls ~6ua while running to check the state of the tilt switch. When the state changes, it wakes up the wifi chip, a Nodemcu, and the nodemcu does all the wifi work. That is perfect for this type of project.

This shows the basic diagram, if you want to see all the details go check out the Garage door left open detector project.

It seems like the only hard part of this project is figuring out how to mount the tilt switch. I ended up sticking it vertically on the very bottom edge of the mailbox door with some hot glue.

And in testing it seems to work like I expect, I have the pins pointed down so when the door is closed, the switch reads closed.

Then when the door is open, the switch reads open.

Promising!

I hooked up rest of the circuit, and it seems to be working. Next up is testing it out in the real world.

  • Testing it out for real

    ThinkLearnDo05/04/2021 at 03:46 0 comments

    I hooked everything up on the mailbox, and testing went not so well...


    I wasn't able to detect when the mail came. My guess is in my testing I opened the mailbox past the angle it needed for the tilt switch to open, but the mail person didn't open it far enough to get the switch to open. I think they would need to open it past 90 deg for the switch to open.

    Back to the drawing board!

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Kiwisaft wrote 05/04/2021 at 08:43 point

just mount your tilt-switch already tilted 45 deg or something. or use a photoswitch, or a reed switch

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