Arduino + camera + gsm

Projects General Guidance
1

Dear all,

I recently was informed about the existence of Arduino. I am a software developer.

I am looking for a solution to monitor a letter box, to see at a distance if something is in the letter box without having to go to the location where the letter box is situated.

I was thinking about the following solution:

  • the letter box has no electricty, so i use a battery
  • I use a gsm module with sim card to send a single picture to somewhere (email?) every morning at 9am approx
  • the arduino has to "sleep" when it does not take the picture, and it should boot when it is time to take the picture, because i have to save battery

Questions:

  • is this easily possible with Arduino
  • what components do i need?

Best regards

2

Even if you only power up the GSM module for a minute per day to send a mesage, it is still a relatively high-power option. You will need a big battery to get a long run-time. Other wireless solutions can send a message every few minutes for a year on a single coin cell battery. (That does take a lot of effort to get to that low power consumption.)

How far between mailbox and receiver? Do either of those move around?

Can you detect the mail without a camera? An optical sensor in the bottom that just detects light or dark? A switch when the door is opened? A weight sensor? A camera is very inefficient: you are sending several million bits of data for just a single bit of actual information. You have to actually open the attachment and look at it every time.

3

Well the use of a weight sensor or a combination of two weight sensors could be possible. As it is a big letter box for packages, maybe two weight sensors are needed.

The letter box is standing still. The letter box is in the building of my office, but there is a very very tick wall between the box and my office. Wifi might be possible maybe.

I was planning to use a lithium battery, I assume it should be possible to boot it 100 or 200 times without changing the battery? I can replace it every 6 months.

Does the code in arduino offer an easy possibility to shutdown more or less completely and to boot automatically after 24h (also disabling the power of the wifi or gsm part largely)?