Jennifer's 365 Project

Today is the first day of the Dozynki Polish Harvest Festival in downtown Grand Rapids. My friend Lori first introduced me to this festival a few years ago and I've tried to make it every year. It totally helps that I work downtown. Going to this festival for the first time also resulted in my love of pierogi. Come to think of it, I should try making them again.
I made sure to get some pierogi, because lets face it, I'm in love with those things. I also thought I'd try the Polish torte this year. Tasty!

I kind of want to go back there for dinner...

I had a headache all day so when I got home I wanted nothing more than to go to bed. Chris (and the cat) hung out with me for the evening. They're so great.

I like having bananas around, but I never seem to eat them before they start to get overripe. To be honest, I'm sure part of the problem is that I like a lot of my fruit slightly underripe, so I start to consider it banana bread fodder sooner than I probably need to.

Anyway, I stumbled across this tasty looking recipe for Grilled Banana Boats and I just happened to have two ripe bananas lying around.

So I cut open a slit in the banana peel and stuffed it full of chocolate and marshmallows. I did not have any peanut butter chip.
I tossed them on the side of the grill that is the coolest. I tried to get them nestled in the grooves so they wouldn't fall over.

Then I left them there for about 10 minutes...
One of them had fallen over slightly, but did not spill any thing out into the grill. Hooray!
I even decided to grab some peanut butter and try it that way. Tasty with or without! I will definitely make these again!

 I should be reading one of the bunches of books I have started (especially the library book)....
...or I should be working on integrating the proximity sensor I have into an arduino project. I really think that would be a fun thing to play with...
...but instead I spent several hours playing in a Guild Wars 2 stress test this evening. Woo!

Anticipation for the launch of Guild Wars 2 is in full swing this week. The game launched next Tuesday but I'll be in the headstart beginning on Saturday. So I was pretty excited when Charrlie, an adorable Charr plushie, arrived in the mail today. Even Leki had some interest, if only to lick and chew on the hair.

I spent a little more time tweaking the arduino snail mail project today. First and foremost was getting the arduino to send emails. It's all well and good to get iOS notifications but neither of us have iPhones. While an iOS notification would be useful to Chris (he uses his tablet a lot during the day) it's not for me. I'd much prefer to get an email notification.

So Chris wrote a little PHP code that send emails and I tweaked the arduino sketch to pull the PHP.

Suddenly I was receiving emails!
Next was getting an LED to light up when the snap action switch opened. Initially I ran into an issue where I was using a pin already reserved for the ethernet shield, but once I plugged into pin 9 (instead of 10) it was smooth sailing.
Now when the mailbox opens, the green LED will turn on (and stay on). I also get an iOS notification (as you can see in the background), and an email.

The next major bit I'm going to tackle is building in a timer for the LED. I'd like to have it designed so that when the mailbox first opens, the light comes on. Hours later when I come home and get the mail, the light is turned off (triggered by the second opening of the box). 

If you're wondering what the purpose of the LED is, its to work as a visual status indicator. The intent is to have this arduino project sitting in its to-be-created housing by the front door. Then, on the off chance that neither of us have checked email or used an iOS device recently, we'll see the green light is on and check the mail.

Soon there will be no excuse to leave mail in the mailbox. Ever. Even if I wanted to.

Of course there's still the issue with the wireless. I've been eyeballing those two WR703Ns I have but haven't worked up to messing with them.

NOTE: Update 1/9/2013: A full project update can be found here.

I'll admit it's been awhile since I've messed with the arduino. I've been pretty into Guild Wars lately so I haven't been messing with it as much. But this morning I decided to get this little project going again.

This version (as opposed to the RF transmission one) involves using an ethernet connection and pushes notifications to iOS using Prowl. There's a nice video out on MAKE which is where I got this idea from.

It's really a pretty easy setup.
Using a snap action switch inside the mailbox, the lid keeps the switch normally closed...
...and when the mailbox opens, the switch triggers the arduino to send the notification out.
Yay technology!

One of the major hurdles with this setup is the need for an ethernet cord. Since my router and front door aren't next to each other, I need a wireless solution.

I spend a chunk of the day trying to get Open-WRT configured on the little WR703N to act as a bridge between the arduino and the wireless network. I only succeeded in wanting to rip my hair out. I'll get there eventually, I just have to undo a lot of "damage" I did today on the router configuration.

Sometime down the road I plan on adding an LED notifier (hence the breadboard in the photos). The plan is to have the light go on once the switch is triggered. The light would remain on until mail is retrieved from the box later in the day. I'm still working out the code for that.

Anyway, if you're curious here's the example code, schematic, and a list of hardware/software I used today.

Hardware

• arduino
• ethernet shield (which plugs directly on top of the arduino)
• a snap action switch
• 10K resistor
• wire (I had 22 gauge lying around)

Software

• Prowl
• Avviso library

This arrived today. It makes noises, lights up, and comes with a multi-page manual. Chris was very excited.

Guild Wars 2 launches on August 28th. What better way to prepare than to blow through the two novels currently out that bridge the story between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.

I spent my lunch hour down at Rosa Parks Circle, as I usually do during the week. This time instead of a friendly squirrel I was greeted by an enthusiastic sparrow curious to see if I had any crumbs near me.

Sadly I did not.

Finally! This is the first time I've seen the cat actually use anything that came out of the cat bed crafting day in June (aka first wedding anniversary).

Glad to see he's using one of the beds, even if it is the super over-sized mistake one.

It's still construction season.