A prior post talked about a lightweight and reliable method for sending push notifications from an Arduino to a mobile phone. In this post I’ll to describe my application for the notifications.
When looking for project inspiration I saw a couple of designs for monitoring a postal mailbox and sending a notification when the door was opened (e.g. when you get new mail). Those didn’t seem very useful but they did tickle a notion I’ve had of knowing if my garage door was left open for a period of time. I see this happen regularly in our neighborhood and it sometimes results in the loss of bicycles, tools and once even a car. In the spirit of truth-in-posting we once left ours open all night. Fortunately nothing was taken. Now on to the build…
The parts list, other than a basic pullup resistor and some wire, is pretty short and consists of
- " target="_blank">Arduino Uno
- WiFly WiFi Shield
- Arduino Project Enclosure
- Arduino Wall Adapter
- Magnetic Proximity Sensor, and
- A pair of Screw Terminals
In simple terms the goal of the project is to send me an alert if the door is open longer than a specified period of time (e.g. 15 minutes) and to send me an update if the door closes after that time period. Quite simple eh? I also implemented a “health check” that enables the Arduino to ping my server periodically. A script runs on the server and if it doesn’t hear from the Arduino it too will send an alert letting me know there has been a monitoring failure. After all what good is a security device that fails silently?
If you’re interested in a project like this let me know and I can give you the source code (sketch).
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