Amazons Delivery preferences ignored by driver

Not so much DIY but Ring doorbells do all this .

I have a large steel secure delivery box bolted to the wall in my porch. It has a notice, in large letters, on the front of the parcels flap, saying 'All deliveries in here please', with the addition of the Amazon logo and the words 'Amazon Safe Place'. Even so, I sometimes find deliveries, which would have fitted into the flap, on top of the box.

My bell push pulls an input on an Arduino.

That transmits a signal to a microserver running the house PBX.

The PBX rings every phone in the house with an 'urgent' cadence, which is repeated.

There is a bell in the garden, which is switched on (by dialling *61) if I'm working out there.

There is a camera covering the front door. We had a case about a year ago when I saw a van pull up with a delivery for SWMBO. She ran downstairs, to find we'd been carded and he'd driven off. She phoned the courier company and they said the driver had rung/knocked repeatedly - SWMBO pointed out that the video recording showed that he only went near the door to post the card in. Half an hour later a very pissed off driver returned with the package.

Well people have home brewed cat flaps driven by a Raspberry Pi that won't let the cat in if said cat has something in it's mouth, like a mouse or vole... IIRC it relyed on the side silouette of the cats head and simple (ha!) shape matching. No AI.

Wether that could be extended to detect a side on person shaped silouette carrying a box is another matter.

Really, something which can be "armed" by the reciept of a delivery slot email, so that it's watching the path for that time.

Not 100% foolproof, but would exclude most cold callers. Who you don't want to hear from anyway.

Reliably parsing the many different formats of delivery slot email might be harder than getting the suitable silouette and shape matching working. B-)

Cold callers? Only cold callers we get are JW's and they only appear every two or three years. No "free" newspapers either. The only junk mail comes with the postie and even some of that is usefull. Two £3 off if you spend over £10 in the local Co-op vouchers yesterday. Guess who, by pure coincidence, had a basket value of £10.01 in the local Co-op yesterday.

Nothing a judicious use of regex wouldn't tackle. Could even correct the date format if needs be ...

Perhaps the worst ones round here are youths claiming to be just out of prison etc and trying to go straight. Selling dusters etc you can buy in the shop at half the price. And usually a group of them ferried around in a van by a gang master. Thought it has stopped, but had one the other day.

The first one used a full sized PC. "Flo Control"