I check my emails quite often, probably at least every hour and most of the time I have no new messages. What I needed was a kind of visual notifier that lights a led or waves a flag or makes a noise when I get a new message. My first attempt was using I-Buddy, a funny USB gadget which is intended for using with MSN. When you get an emoticon I-Buddy flips the wings and lights its head. Quite good stuff. In the UK is available for around £15 but I got mine from the Ebay for £2.99 plus a couple of pound for the shipping. If you are a programmer it is possible to make I-Buddy do whatever you want using its API and any language compatible with the .NET Framework (for example C# or VB .NET).

So I wrote a little tool to check my mailbox and make I-Buddy flip the wings if there was a new message. Good enough but then I realised I wanted something working without the need of a computer turned on all the time. I already had a Linksys WRT54GS router modified to work with OpenWRT, an open source firmware working on many devices which turns your router in a real Linux box you can use as a web server, a proxy, a mail server or anything else. Personally I bought mine because I needed an Asterisk server at home and the WRT54GS was powerful enough to manage up to 4 simultaneously calls.

Now you should know the WRT54GS has 2 serial ports on the PCB which are not connected to the external world but they are there for us. I thought I could connect some type of display to one of the serial ports and then drive it with a shell script.

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