Guy Dupont's "Mailblocks" Provides a Wonderful Physicality to Smartphone Push Messages
Designed to curb "goblin"-like obsession with notifications, the Mailblocks blocks notifications unless your phone is nestled inside.
Maker Guy Dupont has built a mailbox with a difference: it houses his smartphone, and notifications only arrive when it's nestled safely inside — providing a physical location for checking notifications in a healthier manner.
"Every time I release one of [my] videos I turn into a social media goblin," Dupont explains. "I am obsessively checking how the video is doing, what people are saying, where they're sharing, etc. I don't think it is particularly healthy to allow every single interaction with my work to just blast itself into my consciousness in real time, so I thought 'what if instead of push notifications, hear me out, pull notifications?
"What if there was a physical place in the real world that I had to get off my ass and go to in order to collect my push notifications like the analog mailboxes of yore?"
That's exactly what Dupont set out to build in the Mailblocks, a plastic mailbox marked "Dopamine" — built from the shell of a kids' toy mailbox. An Unexpected Maker FeatherS3 Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller inside the mailbox sends a signal when a phone is inserted, instructing a Raspberry Pi single-board computer acting as a wireless router to cease blocking Google's push notification services.
"The DHCP is instructed to boot any connected devices off the network," Dupont explains of what happens when his phone is inserted into the Mailblocks. "The phone inside the mailbox disconnects, reconnects, and immediately tries (and succeeds) to reach Google's push servers. Any notifications that have been queued up should come through."
Just in case the mailbox metaphor wasn't complete, the unblocking of push notification comes with a pleasingly physical alert too: the flag on the side, which in a real mailbox would be set by the mail carrier to alert the homeowner to a delivery, is connected to a hobby servo and flies up when notifications are flowing.
"I've discovered that, on Android devices at least, the phone will eventually make a separate connection to the push notification server over your mobile data if the attempts over Wi-Fi don't work," Dupont notes of one hole in the system. "Not much I can do about that.
"I tried to create a dummy notification server that would make the phone think that it was connected over Wi-Fi, but I just ran out of time. Honestly I tend to have mobile data turned off when I'm home anyway, and I also use a few devices around the house that don't use SIM cards."
The full build is detailed in the video embedded above and on Dupont's YouTube channel, with a parts list and more information to follow soon on the project's Hackaday.io page.