Hardware GMail Notifier

The work by Jamie Matthews inspired me to create the similar GMail Notifier.

This project consists of two parts: hardware and software.

The Hardware

The hardware is powered from the USB port. It uses the XBEE USB to serial module to communicate to the computer and MAX882 3.3V regulator. The microprocessor used is MSP430F2131 from Texas Instruments.

Five LEDs are used in this project:

• LED1: Green LED
• LED2: Green LED
• LED3: Yellow LED
• LED4: Red LED
• LED5: POWER Red LED

The microprocessor read from the UART port how many new emails sent from the software.
If there is no new email, LED1 to LED4 will turn off.
If there is one new email, LED1 will turn on.
If there is 2 new emails, LED1 and LED2 will turn on.
If there is 3 or 4 new emails, LED1 to LED3 will turn on.
If there is 5 or more new emails, all LEDs will turn on.

The Software

The software is written in C#. Using the GetGmailFeed( ) function written by Kevin Daly, we can get the atom feed from Gmail which is in XML format.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
<title>Gmail - Inbox for xxxxx@gmail.com</title>
<tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
<fullcount>2</fullcount>
...
</feed>

All we need to do next is to parse the XML docs and get the fullcount tag (which is the number of new emails) and pass it to the hardware through the virtual COM port.

Explore posts in the same categories: MSP430, My Projects

Tags: MSP430

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