Santa’s Mailbox
My nephew loves the holidays and demands a Christmas walk almost every night where he gets to enjoy the neighborhood lights. There is one house which had a larger mailbox that opened and closed which he became obsessed with so I decided to recreat one for his room using a Pico and my new knowledge in Rust.
I found a nice small mailbox that was Christmas themed and could fit on his bookshelf. I also wanted some bling so I got a small strand of firefly led lights to wrap around the exterior.
I wanted this easy to use so I added a power jack on the back of the mailbox that could easily be plugged into the wall with a 5V adapter.
The pico was powered by 5 volts which was easy to wire. The LED’s were powered by a 3.3 V battery pack I removed and directly wired to the 3.3V rail of the pico. This means they simply power on with the device.
The Rust code to control the pico was very entry level and simply sets the Channel value for a continuous rotation servo. I had to do some tweaking to make sure i got a nice slow speed for the mailbox to open and close.
I grabbed a pack of model airplane control rods and servo attachments for cheap to make the mechanical linkage which would open and close the device. These were stiff hardened wire which worked really nicely.
I made a little letter by hand to attach to the mechanical linkage to hide the hardare and the masterpiece was complete.
Its his favoriate holiday decoration now! This was a great intro to embedded rust along with extending my pico experience.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VqLTYNi2pqk