Letterbox Alert finished!

[MM]

Here is the finished project:

MM

[Jim GM4DHJ at the Holiday Haci]

does that not scare the shit out of the postman ? ......

[Tim Watts]

I like that - a very nice idea :)

[MM]

He's hardly going to hear it from *out*side the house as he's walking away! Not the way our posties walk, anyway. Speedy Gonzalez is a snail by comparison.

MM

[MM]

You could almost imagine Thing reaching through...

MM

[MM]

Next up: some kind of sensor to alert me if I leave the kitchen with a pan on the (hot) hotplate. I've ruined at least three frying pans since I was started on statins. Haven't needed to call the fire brigade yet, but on one occasion the kitchen was full of smoke.

Then I installed a smoke alarm IN the kitchen!

House (new in 2004) has three interconnected smoke alarms, none of them in the kitchen. I really need to hook the one I installed into the circuit, but the trouble is, the circuit doesn't pass by/through the kitchen at all. I suppose the builder didn't fit one in the kitchen because the extra one I did fit goes off all the time while I'm cooking. But it is equipped with a silencer button that gives me 8 minutes respite. I'm always forgetting to prod it, though, and then I'm just heaving an omelette out of the pan and off it goes, frightening the life out of me. It's very loud.

Notwithstanding any of the above, I would dearly like a repeated spoken alert "You have left a pan on the stove!" whenever I forget and exit the kitchen. Not using bell wire, though! This one will need a radio or Bluetooth transmitter thingy. I'm surprised no company has manufactured something, and I did check pretty exhaustively on the web.

MM

[Jim GM4DHJ at the Holiday Haci]

did you know all posties have a competition going as to how long in a year they can wear shorts? ......

[Tim Watts]

Could you get a current transformer around the cooker feed live in the CU?

From there you could potentially do something useful - eg if cooker drawing > 0.1A for > 30 mins, sound alarm. Have a cancel button that puts the detection off for another 30 mins - it would act a bit like a train drivers vigilence device.

Or if you don't want to mess with the CU, perhaps an IR detector (like an IR thermometer) adapted to a wide enough view to see the whole hob and wired to something similar?

[alan_m]

Just wait you get someone like the a******e that delivers the free papers around my way and who _never_ pushes them fully through the letter box.

[Bob Eager]

An enhancement to lock the garden gate shut until the letterbox is closed?

[alan_m]

A smoke alarm fitted fitted inappropriately outside the kitchen door (above the door) works fine. I have one that can be disabled for a couple of minutes by pressing the corner of the casing which activates an internal switch.

Example:

[sam]

I think you would be better off with a fully programmable alarm system with the stove elements as inputs and a movement sensor in the kitchen so it can detect if you have left the kitchen with any stove top element turned on. Gets tricky tho when leaving the kitchen with something boiling which isn't so important, but its no big deal if its alarms in that situation.

That way you could alarm differently if you leave the house with any of the stove elements still on and treat the oven differently. I do sometime choose to go and get something with the roast cooking in the oven because that takes hours.

And the letterbox sensor can be just another input to that.

[MM]

Our usual postie is a young, pretty blonde woman, but sadly she ~never~ wears shorts. In the local town the male posties do seem to wear shorts A LOT, but I have a feeling this has more to do with some kinky desire to feel the wind blowing around the mouse in the house than just keeping cool. Next time you see a male postie in shorts, observe whether he squats down a lot to investigate his bike. Any excuse to free the mouse!

MM

[MM]

I don't feel confident messing with the CU. It needs a solution that detects, say, the red warning light that comes on (on the cooker hob) a few seconds after I've switched on one of the heating rings (each of the four rings has its own warning light). Although this would mean that the sensor would alert even if the stove was barely warm, that would suffice as an initial project.

I'm pretty sure Velleman do a temperature sensor kit. I have good access to the underside of the cooker hob, which is set into the work surface (the oven is a separate unit elsewhere in the kitchen).

I already have a Basic Stamp and a Raspberry PI.

MM

[MM]

Well, the Polycell doesn't stop sounding once the flap closes. Just like closing the door wouldn't switch it off if it were being used for its original purpose as a door alarm.

MM

[Jim GM4DHJ at the Holiday Haci]

ours is an old ugly blonde wummin'....but she is nice

[MM]

You could take that idea to the nth degree. For instance, letterbox open + postie more than 1 foot away from door = release hungry* Doberman.

*The East German border guards deliberately kept the hounds hungry so that they would attack first and listen to commands second.

MM

[John Rumm]

Next, the "internet of things" connection, and a smartphone app to popup with a "you've got mail" announcement in true Joanna Lumley voice ;-)

[Bob Eager]

Start off with an ESP8266 and an Arduino...

[MM]

No, no, no! Not Tombstone Teeth! Puhleeze!

MM