e-mailbox

E-mailbox was one of the first Prototyping projects developed while I was working as a Junior Hardware Engineer at Modulab. This project is a mailbox concept which scans a postcard and then sends it via e-mail to a specified-by-user address. The concept was entirely developed by Modulab for the National Museum of Romanian Literature and I was only in charge of the application development.

As you can see in Figure 1, the system was cased in a red wooden enclosure standing above the floor on a black metal pole (not included in this figure). On the front side of the e-mailbox there are located a thin slot for inserting the postcard to be scanned, a touchscreen display, and another slot for retrieving the postcard.

I will briefly present the software application that I developed using Python running on a small Rasberry Pi computer. As displayed in the following Figures 2 to 6 it was organized into 5 main stages, starting from an idle one. Transitioning to the second stage was performed immediately after the inserting of a postcard in the scanner’s slot. Once the scanning process was completed, the applications automatically moved to the third stage where the scan was previewed. Here is where the user had the option of accepting the scan or repeating it. Once the scan was accepted the user was asked to enter the sender’s email, a subject, and body for the email. Finally, in the final stage of the application, the email was sent.

Developing this software application was a challenging and demanding process for me even if I already had at that time a basic knowledge of Linux operating systems and Python programming languages. More importantly, the toughest challenge was to think of all the errors that could appear in any of the application’s stages and write error-handling routines for them (e.g. losing the Internet connections treated by inserting the e-mail in a queue).