Email Notification Via An RGB LED


This project provides LED feedback when an email is received. It uses a 4d-micro-USB module from Dontronics to interface serially and provide power to a Picaxe 08M. The PIC can control color and brightness of a RGB LED. The feedback is given by seven colors of the LED. The code is python script and picaxe basic, which he’s posted.

15 thoughts on “Email Notification Via An RGB LED

  1. Have something just like this with the LED taped to the corner of my screen, very handy. I built mine using an arduino, with the “SimpleMessageSystem” on it. That coupled with some python using libserial and libgmail. It’s really nice being alerted off-screen for some reason!

  2. @jme: To be honest, I built this long enough ago to have forgotten why there were two resistors! I suspect that they were in there for programming the Picaxe (i.e. the 22k is a current limiting resistor and the 10k a “pull-down” resistor) and vaguely recall that for some reason I had a problem when I tried to remove the “redundant” 22k resistor…

  3. Hi all,

    I’m currently finishing work on a similar device, but have extended the python code with following capabilities:

    – checks for twitter updates
    – listens to “new message” alerts issued by pidgin
    – listens to “new email” alerts from thunderbird
    (thunderbird needs dBus extensions for this)

    When some new msg is received, a system notification appears for some seconds, a LED is lit with the corresponding color and a tray icon with the symbol for twitter, email or pidgin appears. Clicking on this tray icon switches off the LED again.

    I have set up thunderbird to also poll my favorite RSS feeds every ten minutes and forward all new articles to my local inbox – so I get notifications too when the RSS feeds are updated..

    Now working on making things small enough to fit inside my eee1000h netbook…

    :)

    cheers

  4. To be honest, I built this long enough ago to have forgotten why there were two resistors! I suspect that they were in there for programming the Picaxe (i.e. the 22k is a current limiting resistor and the 10k a “pull-down” resistor) and vaguely recall that for some reason I had a problem when I tried to remove the “redundant” 22k resistor…

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