Smartphone Mailbox Notifier

Get notified on your smartphone/smartwatch when your mailbox is opened.
Displays a date and time as well as status LEDs using Blynk.

Read the full writeup on the Make Community Projects site.

Based on an ESP8266 and utilizes OTA updates.

RD7

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Nice write up Rob.

OMG!!! Impressive job!

@Rom3oDelta7

(If you are curious, see the comments in the code for why I chose to not use the Blynk RTC widget).

I didn’t find anything in code comments. Could you please explain?
Also - do you need free energy :slight_smile:?

@Dmitriy the comments are included with Rob’s library on GitHub. I think the reference to being unable to compile sketches with the RTC widget are now out of date.

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@Dmitriy,

As @Costas points out, when I wrote this code the RTC widget would not compile in IDE 1.6.11. However, even when using 1.6.9 I still had occasions when the clock would return raw UTC even though an offset had been set in the widget. And yes, I believe these issues are resolved now. However, I decided to keep my workaround (the NTP shim library I posted at the time) because it gave me the functionality I needed without an extra widget on the dashboard.

I’ve made this comment before, so forgive the redundancy, but widgets like RTC, mail, and notification all take up dashboard space without adding anything to the user interface. I’d really like to see them be invisible or hidden in some way. (Heck, the mail widget is bigger than the LED one!) Since I had a way to get the time with no loss of functionality and without the RTC widget I left it in. Nothing more than that.

You have a great team and a great product - this is just friendly feedback :slight_smile:

Regards, Rob

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@Rom3oDelta7 your comments regarding dashboard space for RTC and Email widgets are also out of date.

For example the Email widget now allows you to enter an email address on the fly and timezones are accessed with the RTC so both have user interaction.

I don’t disagree that you can set the UTC offset in the RTC widget - it just did not work reliably in my testing. Perhaps this has been addressed - I have not tried it since 0.3.8.

Also, you may be missing my point on the widgets using dashboard space. IMHO any widget that uses space on the dashboard but does not directly interact with the user on the dashboard itself (e.g. you press it and nothing happens) is poor user interface design.

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