As part of Instructables’ Internet of Things (IoT) contest, maker Louis Elwood-Leach has created an electronic mailbox flag based that pops up when you receive an email, a new Tweet, or any other notification you can think you’d need.

Inside of the plastic case you’ll find a variety of electronics hooked up to a Feather Huzzah, an Arduino-compatible board that is the brains of the machine.

This handles the complex task of speaking to a cloud platform to check for certain notifications and activate a motor, raising the flag if one is found.

If the code and the hardware works correctly, the flag will pop up. Check out the gif below to see a notification of a Facebook Messenger notification.

The flag is meant to be interchangeable based on what you’re using it for. There is included flags to signify email, exercise, Messenger, meal times, calendar events, phone calls and Twitter. Using the included stencil, you could make one for whatever you’d like, provided you know how to alter the code to hook into the API of whatever service you’d like to be notified of.

The total cost of this cool little gadget is about $45.50 (R629) in components, which means that it isn’t very cheap and it requires a lot of assembly. Luckily, it’s one of the simpler projects (it’s even billed as a “great introduction to wifi connected devices and the IoT”) and the full guide really helps.

If that doesn’t put you off and you still want to build a nifty little IoT device, the full instructions complete with files and code can be found in the Instructables guide. 

[Source – Arduino on Twitter Via Instructables]