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 one in every 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 many others. 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 an alternative of push notifications, hear me out, pull notifications?
“What if there was a bodily place in the true world that I needed to get off my ass and go to with a purpose 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 telephone is inserted, instructing a Raspberry Pi single-board pc appearing as a wi-fi router to stop blocking Google’s push notification providers.
“The DHCP is instructed in addition any linked gadgets off the community,” Dupont explains of what occurs when his telephone is inserted into the Mailblocks. “The telephone contained in the mailbox disconnects, reconnects, and instantly tries (and succeeds) to succeed in 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 facet, which in an actual mailbox can be set by the mail service to alert the home-owner to a supply, is linked to a passion 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 not less than, the telephone 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 may make the telephone 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 house anyway, and I additionally use just a few gadgets round the home that do not use SIM playing cards.”
The total construct is detailed within the video embedded above and on Dupont’s YouTube channel, with a elements listing and extra data to observe quickly on the undertaking’s Hackaday.io web page.
