SmartBox: a Smart Post Box

For the course Smart Environments we had a project with five students. We had to make a Smart Environment. We chose to make a intelligent post box: The SmartBox. We had to write a project plan, requirements document, design document, test report and an evaluation report.

Besides the documents we had to make a prototype of our idea. We made a wooden post box our selves. In this box we put a scanner, which is connected to a PC. In the box there is also a distance sensor connected to a Arduino. The Arduino is connected to the same PC as the scanner. On the PC we run a driver and software for the scanner, CMD Twain to start to scanner automatically and OCR Software to translate the name of the sender and receiver on the image into text. The image of the post is saved into a folder on the PC. The OCR Software is automatically translating this image into a txt.file. A Processing sketch is checking this file for the names of the sender and receiver and calculates the importance of the post. We took an envelope as important post, and newspapers and advertisements as not important. When the post is defined as important the emailadress of the receiver will be picked from the database and an email with a attached pdf of post and a link to the website of the sender, is sent. We used another Arduino connected to another PC. LEDs are connected to this Arduino. When the post is important a high signal will be sent from the other PC to this PC using Xbees. On the Arduino with the lights is running a Arduino sketch, which reads the data of the Serial and turns on the light of the correct receiver.