Postman detector with web enabled camera, BlinkStick and Raspberry Pi

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blinkstick-raspberry-pi-postman-detector

Quentin Stafford-Fraser came up with a brilliant idea on how to combine web enabled camera, BlinkStick and Raspberry Pi to give him a notification whenever postman arrives at his door. It also gives a great overview of BlinkStick package for Python.

Check out his original blog post with embedded video and links to all of the tools and software packages used to achieve this neat hack!

It’s so great for me to see hacks like this. This is the main reason why I created BlinkStick in the first place: to be a simple tool that lets you use it in ways that I could have never imagined! 🙂

Introducing BlinkStick

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Hi, my name is Arvydas and I am very exited to introduce BlinkStick – a do-it-yourself RGB LED the size of a flash drive. When I first got to know ATTiny85 microcontroller I was fascinated by the power within it: an extremely small chip could be used in so many applications. What really interested me was the ability to make it into a USB device with just a few extra components.

I like the notification LED on my mobile phone. It shows me when I have new email, IM or social network message, but I didn’t have anything like this on my PC, so I set out to build it. ATTiny85 seemed like a perfect candidate for the job, because it has the exact amount of pins for USB communication and drive an RGB LED.

2It all started out as a simple task to display an LED notification when I receive an email to my PC, but has become an attractive DIY kit that can be controlled remotely, act as an ambilight clone, be fully hackable with support for various programming languages and even run on Raspberry Pi.

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Keep checking this space for updates to the website, a bit of history of how it all came together, tips and news about the project or subscribe to RSS to receive notifications about new posts.