The humble mailbox is about to get a whole lot smarter with the advent of Mr. Postman. The project conceived and developed by Simple Elements LLC is a Wi-Fi enabled, solar powered smart mailbox which is designed not just to handle your snail mail but also your packages. Mr. Mailbox tries to make your mailbox smarter as well as safer. Mr. Mailbox comes with its companion smartphone app that alerts you when you have got mail. Apart from notifications the mobile app lets you know if your mailbox has been tampered with and serves as keyless entry system. The mailbox learns the time when the postman usually delivers the mail at your doorstep and remains unlocked for the mailman to deliver the mail after which it sends the notification to the user and locks itself down. If the user is on a vacation and wants a friend or neighbour to pick the mail for him/her he can send a onetime virtual key via text message or email that that lets the trusted person unlock the mailbox.


While developing the prototype of the mailbox, its makers used Raspberry Pi to handle the computing but later opted for The Spark Core which is a little bit pricey as compared to the Raspberry Pi but it is smaller and uses Arduino-compatible ARM Cortex-M3 platform along with a Texas Instruments Simple Link CC 3000 Wi-Fi chip. The Wi-Fi chip allows the mailbox to get hooked up on the user’s home internet network and send alerts to the cloud which can then be sent to the user’s app. Mr. Postman is powered by a 2300mAh battery that can be recharged by the 0.6 W mono-crystalline solar panel present on the mailbox or the backup 3.7V battery.

As of this writing, the project has received funds of 7,331 US dollars on #-Link-Snipped-# and with 35 days to go it seems plausible that it can achieve its $50,000 goal. To get your hands on this smart mailbox you have to shell out at least 180 US dollars (11,146 INR) which seems like quite a lot of money to spend on a mailbox.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#