Arduino’s Yún powers this Gmail (alert) lamp

The Atmel-powered Arduino Yún may have only begun shipping this week, but eager Makers like Stefano Guglielmetti have already begun using the board in various DIY projects. Specifically, Guglielmetti built a Gmail (alert) lamp programmed to ping him in real-time about incoming emails labelled “important.”

“I need to be alerted in real time when I receive some important emails. Not all the emails –  we provide customer care for many clients, with different SLAs, and I need to be alerted only for the most important ones,” Guglielmetti wrote in an official Arduino blog post. “Moreover, sometimes I look forward to receiving a [specific] email, [so] I need something flexible, eye catching, that doesn’t depend on my computer or my cellphone.”

According to Guglielmetti, the working principle behind the DIY project is really quite straightforward.

“On Gmail, I defined a new label, so I can quickly change the rules for the messages that will go under it, then I tell to Arduino Yún which label to watch for (via REST APIs… amazing) and that’s it,” he explained. “The lamp – actually only just an LED [for now] – turns on every time I get new messages under that label. It’s the bat-signal principle!”

In terms of the code, Guglielmetti says he leveraged a number of new features unique to the Yún.

“In a single day I learned how to use the Bridge library to get data from REST webservices, how to save and load data from the Linux filesystem, and how to run processes on the Linux side and get the STDOUT results,” Guglielmetti added. “Now I will build the actual lamp, improving both the hardware and software.”

Additional information about the Gmail lamp project can be found here.

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the Yún – designed in collaboration with Dog Hunter – is based on Atmel’s ATMega32u4 microcontroller (MCU) and also features the Atheros AR9331, an SoC running Linino, a customized version of OpenWRT. The Yún is somewhat unique in the Arduino lineup, as it boasts a lightweight Linux distribution to complement the traditional microcontroller (MCU) interface.

The Atmel-powered Arduino Yún can be snapped up for $69, or €52.