MailSnail

How MailSnail works
MailSnail logo

Inspiration

We've found that we all have a problem of forgetting to check our mail boxes and thus often missing an important letter or checking them too often.

What it does

Mailsnail informs you when there is a letter in the mailbox; by sending a notification that you have a new letter in your mailbox to you as a tweet, email or displaying it on the screen of a smart coffee mug. In addition, we did some work on the coffee mug and taught it to display the temperature of the drink inside it. Just to make it extra awesome.

How we built it

We used python with flask over nginx for backend, integrating twilio and twitter apis for additional functionality. html/css for front end, with java/xml android prototyping front end for the sensor systems.

Challenges we ran into

Making it all work together

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Solving a real life problem by using awesome technology and learning a lot while doing it.

What we learned

A lot of new cool technology tricks

What's next for junction2016

Coming up with more awesome projects and making them come to life. http://mailsnail.tech/index.html

Built With

Submitted to

Junction 2016

Created by

Wrote two Android apps.

One for taking photos with regular intervals and determine if there has been any change since the last photo. If there had been a change, the app notified the server that mail has arrived.

The other one updated the coffee mug's screen when mail arrived.

Walter Berggren
I worked on the server side of the hack, setting up the Flask app and the database on an EC2 instance. I also tried working on an experimental dashboard written in JS, but we found it was impractical and out of scope.

Maisie Bell
Computer Science undergrad at UCL.
I wrote the backend on flask and integrated the several apis

Jean-Paul Breuer
Emil Lyytikkä
Milda Norkute