They’re a lot better than that where I live.

Still the best option, huh?

As someone else said, it’s mainly so I can ask couriers to leave packages in specific places, tell salespersons to go away without getting up, etc.

This one. Especially if I am not home.

That’s an interesting solution. However I don’t need this. I basically want a video intercom with whoever’s at the door.

Maybe I’ll look into electronic locks later, I guess. It’s not really a priority.

Mm, that could be a problem for the battery even if it does connect. You could probably work around it if you really wanted to; solar powered repeater high up somewhere between the box and the house. But that’s getting into silly territory. :P

Next time you’re out there see what signal you get from your phone, maybe? Just hold it away from your car.

Awesome, gonna bookmark those for later. Thanks!

No problem. The one I used is an ESP32 DevKitC, and you can find info about it on Espressif’s site, or just google the pinout diagram. For basic tasks it should be all you need since it has lots of binary pins, two ADC channels, two DAC channels, realtime clock, special pins for waking it from deep sleep, two I2C, etc. Though if you want to do video input you probably want something else, I’m learning.

Anyway, if you can spare the money to get one just to toy with I’d definitely recommend it.

Yeah, all it does is tell me when something is obscuring one of the sensors. I figure anything that gets 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