Thursday, 12 April 2012

Gmail Priority Inbox notifier using Arduino and Python


While I am taking a little break this week for mid sem break, I decided to do a physical Gmail notifier , (as if all notifications from my gtalk , phone and tablet are not enough :P). 
Well , the catch is it will notify only for the important messages (using gmail's priority inbox feature). So I can turn off notifications from other gmail clients as there are a lot of spams in my inbox(well, 99.99% spam is from my university. mails for all the events I don't give a damn ). 
The design is simple ,I fetch the important mail from gmail rss feed (https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/important) using python script and send data to arduino using pyserial . There is a notification LED and a lcd screen displaying title of latest important mail which obviously are controlled by Arduino. LED and LCD should be off if there is no new mail. 
To do list: put a speaker ;P, write tutorial on my blog, and integrate twitter notification. I will be doing them next week if I could find some time.. 
The main benefit is I learnt a couple of python tricks in this hack.;)

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