Maker Man Dupont has constructed a mailbox with a distinction: it homes his smartphone, and notifications solely arrive when it is nestled safely inside — offering a bodily location for checking notifications in a more healthy method.
“Each time I launch considered one of [my] movies I flip right into a social media goblin,” Dupont explains. “I’m obsessively checking how the video is doing, what persons are saying, the place they’re sharing, and so forth. I do not suppose it’s significantly wholesome to permit each single interplay with my work to only blast itself into my consciousness in actual time, so I assumed ‘what if as a substitute of push notifications, hear me out, pull notifications?
“What if there was a bodily place in the actual world that I needed to get off my ass and go to as a way to accumulate my push notifications just like the analog mailboxes of yore?”
That is precisely what Dupont got down to construct within the Mailblocks, a plastic mailbox marked “Dopamine” — constructed from the shell of a children’ toy mailbox. An Surprising Maker FeatherS3 Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller contained in the mailbox sends a sign when a cellphone is inserted, instructing a Raspberry Pi single-board laptop performing as a wi-fi router to stop blocking Google’s push notification companies.
“The DHCP is instructed as well any linked gadgets off the community,” Dupont explains of what occurs when his cellphone is inserted into the Mailblocks. “The cellphone contained in the mailbox disconnects, reconnects, and instantly tries (and succeeds) to achieve Google’s push servers. Any notifications which have been queued up ought to come via.”
Simply in case the mailbox metaphor wasn’t full, the unblocking of push notification comes with a pleasingly bodily alert too: the flag on the aspect, which in an actual mailbox can be set by the mail service to alert the home-owner to a supply, is linked to a pastime servo and flies up when notifications are flowing.
The mailbox is powered by an Surprising Maker FeatherS3 board with battery and a custom-made presence sensor. (📷: Man Dupont)
“I’ve found that, on Android gadgets a minimum of, the cellphone will finally make a separate connection to the push notification server over your cellular knowledge if the makes an attempt over Wi-Fi do not work,” Dupont notes of 1 gap within the system. “Not a lot I can do about that.
“I attempted to create a dummy notification server that might make the cellphone suppose that it was linked over Wi-Fi, however I simply ran out of time. Truthfully I are inclined to have cellular knowledge turned off once I’m dwelling anyway, and I additionally use just a few gadgets round the home that do not use SIM playing cards.”
The complete construct is detailed within the video embedded above and on Dupont’s YouTube channel, with a components checklist and extra info to comply with quickly on the venture’s Hackaday.io web page.