A little project I'm thinking about - to replace the utterly useless doorbell I've got that I can't hear when I've got my headphones on. mandatory xkcd link
Sensors
- Vibration Sensor to detect when postbox is used.
- Force Sensor for doorbell
- Motion Sensor to detect whether person is still there
- temperature sensor for outside temp logging
- maybe RFID?
Hardware
- Viglen MPC-L - £79 low-power (10W) PC
- Phidgets 8/8/8 InterfaceKit
Software
- the phidgets stuff can be written in C/C++ or Java, plus there are scripting language stuff to go on top
What I want it to do
- Detect when someone pushes a doorbell
- Detect when someone opens the letterbox, or when mail hits a pressure pad in the letterbox.
- Detect when someone opens a door
then...
- the doorside box would transmit wirelessly to a main server
- that server would fire off notifications to logged-in users on a handful of local boxes (XMPP, Growl protocol and SSH)
- Jabber Programmer's Guide
- those notifications could be playing audio, speaking (OS X: say, Linux: festival), growl notifications
- that server could also possibly use twitter w/shared updates
- SMS
- dump some statistics somewhere useful (e.g. number of times the bell is pressed and the door is not opened)
- maybe use it to log delivery attempts - i.e. if someone tries to deliver something, we could actually see if they did ring the bell or not