Smart Mailbox

With the advent of email and smart phones we have all become accustomed to quasi instantaneous notifications, but some things still require the use of snail mail.. Waiting for mail delivery when you're expecting something, can become an all consuming event, either you wait by the box, or you continue to walk out to see if there's anything there until it finally shows up..

The USPS has made things a little simpler with Informed Delivery, emailing pictures of your letters so you know what's coming, but they haven't solved the delivery schedule so you can know when it's been delivered.

The Sensor hub I was sent to use for this project is a great little device for demonstrating the abilities of the DPS310 but doesn't lend itself well to other uses. Since my project requires the transmission of a notification the BLE radio in the sensor hub is not powerful enough to reach inside the house, so I decided to purchase a DPS310 and build the project from scratch.

I purchased 4 of these chips which are 2 X 2.5 x 1 millimeters, pretty tiny devices, and very easy to lose.

Being so small and designed to be surface mounted these little beauties are difficult to mount by hand. After dropping and losing one, I was able to mount the second onto a small 10 X 11 mm adapter board, then soldered on headers so it can be used on a breadboard.

I chose the Arduino MKR1000 for communication because it has built in Wifi and it has a 3.3v operating voltage that matches the DPS310, and has a built in Lipo battery charging circuit so that the final project can be powered with a battery.

the DPS310 has I²C built in, so I connected it to the MKR1000 using the connections outlined in the datasheet.

I downloaded the Arduino drivers for the DPS310 from the Github Repository, but they will not compile for the MKR1000, so I have been working on modifying the code, but as of yet It still isn't working.

If this doesn't work I will have to purchase a level shifter to switch between 3.3 and the 5 volts of the Uno and try to attach it to the Arduino Uno.