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Driving the Cheeky Mail Notifier from Arduino


Arduino developer known as Krulkip sent me this little article along with Arduino sketch and video clip. To fit it into the blog I had to do some reformatting; what follows is Krulkip’s article – enjoy!

The webmail-notifier from Dreamcheeky is advertised as follows:

The WebMail Notifier has pretty light and optional sound alert software to tell you when you have email on one or all of your accounts, including Facebook. Dream Cheeky did what we do best with this product… helping you be more unproductive at the office. Now when you sneak off to the bathroom to check personal emails on your Blackberry, your trip will definitely not be wasted.
WebMail Notifier supports: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook Express, POP3, Weibo, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I wanted to control the Webmail Notifier from an arduino. As this is a USB device i needed to use the usb-host-shield manufactured by circuitsahome. With a little help from Oleg from circuitsathome and with the windows program from Frederic Delhoume i finally managed to get it working. What was needed was to send the unit two initialization sequences:

init1[7] = { 0x1F, 0×01, 0×25, 0×00, 0xC4, 0×00, 0×25, 0×03 };
init2[7] = { 0×00, 0×01, 0×25, 0×00, 0xC4, 0×00, 0×25, 0×04 };

Then you send the colour code eg:

msg3[7] = { 0xFF, 0xFF, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×25, 0×05 };

As Oleg explains “To write to HID device you either need an OUT endpoint or write to control endpoint.” In the end i used the Usb.setReport command similar to that used in the keyboard example where the keyboard LEDs are turned on/off.

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