First the obligatory video!
As explained in the video, this project uses three easily available Arduino components to allow you to:
- See how many emails you have in your POP3 email account
- Review the "from" and "subject" of your email
- Delete unwanted emails
Here is what it looks like assembled:
The system is a sandwich of..
- Arduino Duemilanova
- Arduino Ethernet Shield
- DFRobot LCD/button shield (available here from Robotshop among others)
I also used some Shield Stacking Headers (available from Adafruit) since the LCD shield wouldn't clear the Ethernet jack on the network shield. Here it is disassembled:
Getting the LCD Shield to work with the Ethernet Shield was a time consuming process. Initially, it looked like there would be no pin conflicts, since the Ethernet Shield uses pins 10, 11, 12 & 13 and the LCD Shield in theory uses 5,6,7,8 and 9, but for whatever reason I just couldn't make it work. I did finally find a blog posting by David Delabassee (here) that pointed out that, in fact, the LCD Shield uses more pins than is documented and shows how to modify LCD4Bit_mod.cpp to remap the pins slightly. Very useful, but it still seemed to blank out for some reason.
So, I ended up testing every single pin combination (which took hours) and I finally determined that if the LCD Shield was on digital pin 13, it just wouldn't work for whatever reason (even though, in theory, that pin is not used by the shield). So, just bending back that leg on the LCD Shield took pin 13 out of the circuit and it now works fine.
I had also wanted to add in one or two LEDs to signal the message count or connected state, but for whatever reason again when I added them in, it just wouldn't work consistently. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix that it would be appreciated!
As explained in the video, I have used the five buttons available on the LCD shield to page through the emails and delete any that I don't want.
I will post the software in subsequent entries, but for now I will just explain that I decided to go with using a mail "pre-processor" application written in PHP. Originally I wanted to do everything on the Arduino so it would be a complete, stand-alone solution, but, alas, it just proved to be too hard for the Arduino's limited text processing abilities and my small brain. Basically, even with the Duemilanova based on the ATMEGA328, you really can't load a string array with more than a couple of hundred characters before the Arduino locks up. Unfortunately, you need to look through at least the first 1,500 - 2,000 characters to get the "from" and "subject" info I wanted. I looking into using PROGMEM, but I just couldn't get my head around it (looks like all that fancy "pointer" stuff I can never figure out!). Then there's the Arduiniana Flash library, but it seems limited to strings you load at the beginning, rather than dynamic strings.
Finally, I just decided to go with a pre-processor written in PHP. I already know enough PHP to be functional and it is excellent for text processing. When I went to figure out how to do sockets programming with PHP, the first tutorial I found was on writing a script to access a POP3 email server (check it out)! Using a pre-processor isn't cheating too much. Tom Igoe uses one in Making Things Talk for his "Networked Air Quality Meter" project. Of course, on a much vaster scale, that is essentially how the RIM Blackberry email system works - emails are routed through their preprocessor software which compresses and reroutes them them down to the smartphone.
That is enough for now. Next up will be the Arduino software & PHP script.
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