re: To catch a thief....

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rig an air horn

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Excellent idea. Since I'll be powering things on a 12v battery, a 12v car alarm siren and a bunch of super bright flashing LED's should do the trick...

A combination of somethign like

This

and

This

Harmless, but I'm sure it would the thief would crap his pants when it went off and he'd never come back...

Me too ??

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I'd go with, "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!".

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I think I'll go with This one...

I think the only thing I'm missing to make all of this work is an "ultra bright" waterproof 12v LED or led strips to flash on and off.

I'm thinking an Arduino/Esp8266/nodeMCU of some form or fashion with a photoresistor to regulate when the "trap" is active and the gyroscope module to spring the trap. The actual "trap" will be, Flashing white LED's around the stone mailbox enclosure, the above sound file playing, and then after a 1 second delay the 12v car alarm triggering. The LED's and alarm siren will be connected to a relay that provides power directly from the 12v battery that powers the Arduino (that allows me to push more current thru the devices). After 1 min, the trap would reset.

I'll try to work up a schematic in the next few days...

Well, while I once upon a time got Home assistant running and abandoned it because I could do everything I needed to thru other home automation platforms, I might set it up again for this project. I discovered that my reolink NVR will interface with HA. That includes making PTZ cameras go to a set monitoring point. If I can get a node MCU to connect from the mailbox, then there's no reason I couldn't use it to trigger HA panning to and zooming in on the mailbox.

But that makes the project a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult....

On the plus side of things, I thought I was going to have to buy a voltage regulator to step down from 12v to 5v for the Arduino or node-mcu. Found out last night that both have onboard voltage regulators and I can power them directly off the 12v battery...

This is the style battery I'm using (except mine's 8ah...)

Dang, Mark Rober JV squad up in here.

I'm impressed.

So Dumbo here has been struggling to get the gyroscope (gy521) to connect the microcontroller. Well it connects to ANALOG pins 4&5, not DIGITAL pins 4&5. As soon as I got that corrected, DATA!

Then I accidently reversed VCC and ground and fried it.

I spent about 20-30 mins coding last night before our family started an epic game of RISK. Was able to get the Gyroscope to turn off/on a LED with a large enough change in the orientation of the X axis. So that's (slow) progress. It should now be easy enough to blend the three sketches together to make them work. That will leave me building a couple of water tight enclosers and we're ready to beta test and deploy...

FWIW, I haven't seriously coded anything since I learned basic (and a few other languages) programming back in the 1980's. And I've never really done it with hardware integration. So this has been a learning experience for me. But it's not awful and I'm figuring it out....

Work's been busy so I haven't had a ton of time to work on coding. However, I took half an hour this PM to work on things. I successfully have the photosensor = low and gyroscope movement = high part of the code working. However, in my moving around of { } during IF / Else statements, the trigger pin D2 for the siren stopped working. It should be easy to resolve, but the kid has youth group tonight (swimming party) and taking the electronics isn't a good combo. The revelation here was figuring our multiple condition IF statements (&& = and / || = or )

That almost takes care of the coding side of things. All that's left is working out the kinks in the above code and figuring out a "reset everything for 5-10 mins after being triggered" sub routine. After that it's "final" build and deploy. Hopefully, with the long weekend and can get all of that resolved.

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All that's left is working out the kinks in the above code and figuring out a "reset everything for 5-10 mins after being triggered" sub routine.

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Resolved with one line of code. All I had to do with insert

delay(300000);

into the part of the IF statement that returns the LED's/Siren to their non triggered state. Easy, peezy.

The code is now complete. All that's left is to build it and deploy.

ETA: I changed the pulldown resistor between the photoresistor and ground from a 1K ohm to 3.3K ohm. That decreased sensitivity of the photoresistor and made it have to be much darker to activate the gyro trigger. The gyro trigger is actually pretty sensitive. I have it set to just about it maximum deflection before it activates and it still triggers with ease.

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I am very much looking forward to the outcome here.

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Murphy's law states that once you put in this amount of time $$$ and work, the dude will never show up again.

Here's a rough schematic...



Eta: There is an error in the schematic. The photoresistor is connected to 19 (pin A0) not 18 (Aref). But it's not worth changing.

eta2: Nevermind. I fixed it.