What happened exactly?

More thinking of the ios app store in this case. But they’re also ripping off the osx dock, IMO. :P

I’ve not booted into windows for a few weeks now. It’s been pretty smooth sailing, one horrifically unoptimised game aside.

It’s not about security. Not anymore, anyway. Maybe when Authenticode was first added to windows. Now they just want to scare users into getting everything through their store, because they’re perennially jealous of the shit Apple can get away with.

The antagonist of Cataclysm is actually legitimately scary.

It was a strong point of the original and Cataclysm…

Mm, that could be a problem for the battery even if it does connect. You could probably work around it if you really wanted to; solar powered repeater high up somewhere between the box and the house. But that’s getting into silly territory. :P

Next time you’re out there see what signal you get from your phone, maybe? Just hold it away from your car.

Awesome, gonna bookmark those for later. Thanks!

No problem. The one I used is an ESP32 DevKitC, and you can find info about it on Espressif’s site, or just google the pinout diagram. For basic tasks it should be all you need since it has lots of binary pins, two ADC channels, two DAC channels, realtime clock, special pins for waking it from deep sleep, two I2C, etc. Though if you want to do video input you probably want something else, I’m learning.

Anyway, if you can spare the money to get one just to toy with I’d definitely recommend it.

Okay so that is an issue with the ESP32, sure. There are a lot of variants.

So from what I can tell, the ESP32 is the SoC chip and what you usually get is a dev board which has that plus a bunch of power regulation bits, a USB connector and UART so you can easily program it, etc. That part varies mostly by pinout. I.e. Same features, different pin location.

There are also variants of the chip, but those are usually more costly and will be named things like ESP32-S2.

Every one I’ve seen can run off 5v or 3.3v and uses the latter for logic, so if you got yourself an arduino kit and then just bought an ESP32 dev board it would almost certainly work with whatever is in the kit. Both are microcontrollers, not microprocessors, so they tend not to have OSes or screens.

Oh interesting. Can you link the detector? I could use that for something else.

Yeah, that thought did occur to me. Drill a hole in the mounting wood below the box, and a channel up the back to hide more of the cable. I might do that some time later, but I’ve already put everything away… :P

When you put mail in the box, unless it’s a REALLY small bit of mail it’ll land so it obscures at least one of the proximity sensors. This then sets the ‘got mail’ statue to ‘on’ in Home Assistant. From there, I have HA set up to send me notifications to go and check the mail.

Before you say so, yes this was a lot of work for something so trivial, but it was fun. Plus I actually get so little physical mail that I can forget to check the mailbox for weeks at a time. Which would be very bad if I got some actually important mail. And actually, that exact thing happened just days after I finished installing the thing. So it has already potentially saved me from a fine.

I’m sorry to say I don’t. :/ You can grab dev boards off aliexpress for cheap, and they’re really easy to play with. Just connect the to your PC via USB to load your initial ESPHome script, and they spring to life. From there you can do basic testing, since they’ll get power from the USB. It’s just a matter of what you decide you want to hook up to them after that. I assume you’re looking for like a hobby kit, like you can get for arduino boards? Something that comes with a bunch of LEDs and I2C components you can fiddle with? Unfortunately I don’t know of any that come with ESP32 dev boards, but I’ll admit I’ve not looked. Sorry.

A shock sensor would be an interesting way to do it, too. :)

Thankfully not. The worst I’ve had was some previous neighbours scratching up the back of the mailbox, probably because I had replaced the shitty old one that came with the place with a nicer one that didn’t match the others. Now everyone has the same mailbox I have, I think because the owners of that unit wanted them to look the same so they could sell it easier.

Thank you!

I’m sure there’s stuff I missed out. Like how I got some round rubber grommets to push the wood screws through when mounting the box to the wooden plank. And how the panels were sealed into the housing with silicone. Ah well. :)

I’m glad people seem to appreciate it.

Using HA I can get the status on my dashboard, but it also sends me notifications via the app and Discord.

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It’s only controversial if you want the game to have easier options. ;)