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Socoder -> C/C++/C#/Other -> Steampunk semaphore email notifier
Thu, 18 Aug 2011, 05:44
waroffice
 		I saw a cool email notifier on hackaday.org the other day and it gave me an idea.

The one on hackaday was a bell from a hotel reception that "dinged" when an email was received.

I thought I could make a better one and more in keeping with my PC style.

So I set about making a semaphore notifier, like the old school car indicators

I had no problem making the electronics work but my troubles started when I tried to get some code to check my gmail account.

I was going to get it to go through the POP process but Gmail uses SSL+POP so sod that!

I found that Gmail uses an ATOM feed for email too so set about making a tool that would work with it.

Using C# and a gmail library I was able to authenticate and get the ATOM feed. From here on in it was just a matter of getting the <fullcount> tag from the XML.

Im no XML expert but after an hour of tinkering I managed to get it working.

if you want to view it in action you can watch the webcam here, asuming i have an unread email.