9

Upgrade your humble letterbox with push notifications

FORGE

you will see ‘Letterbox has been opened!’ and

‘Letterbox is closed’ printed to the Terminal window,

along with the date and time of each action. If you

watch your Google Sheet whilst you do it, you’ll also

see a new row being added and then populated.

Due to the IFTTT applet you made, within about

a minute a push notification from the IFTTT app

should pop up on your phone. You can even press

the notification to open up the spreadsheet and see

the full details, including when the letterbox was

closed again.

Finally, set the script to auto-run each time the

Pi loads, so that it’ll work once installed on your

letterbox without needing to hook up a display

and keyboard. To do this, edit the Pi’s autostart

configuration file:

sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Add this line at the end of the file:

@python /home/pi/Letterbox-Push-Notification/

letterbox.py

Now that everything’s working, it’s time to install

the system on your letterbox. Depending on the exact

design of your letterbox, you may need to adjust how

you fit yours, and experiment a bit with the placement

of the magnet to ensure that the system correctly

registers as open/closed when the letterbox is

in either of these states. A nice long length

of bell wire, as well as a long USB power

lead, should ensure that you can locate the

Pi Zero nicely out of the way and keep

the whole installation neat and tidy.

Now you know how to hack your

letterbox, what are you going to set to

happen when your post arrives? We’d

love to see what this inspires you to

make – get in touch via Twitter to show

off your creations!

You can even press the

notification to open up

the spreadsheet and see

the full details, including

when the letterbox was

closed again

”

”

REMOTE ACCESS

WinSCP and PuTTY are two very useful utilities

for connecting to your Raspberry Pi (or any Linux

machine). WinSCP for Windows gives you an easy tool

for transferring files between your Windows machine

and the Pi, and PuTTY allows you to run commands on

it remotely, as if you were connected to the machine

directly with a screen and keyboard. You can install

the latest version of each from ninite.com – look

under Developer Tools.

Above

The Raspberry Pi

Zero can be mounted

out of the way,

using an adhesive

Velcro pad

Below

This project is

proof that you don’t

need complicated

wiring to make a

useful device