This weekend I started the first offical project in my new workshop. Living out in the country is cool, and having a mailbox at the end of a long driveway is nice and quaint. However, I often come home after dark, and I find that I can't see anything when I open the mailbox. It is just pitch black, and I have to grope around to find all the little flyers and such. I'm always kind of afraid that there will be a rodent or a spider in there one day that will bite my hand off.

I also noticed that the previous owners of the house left behind a nonfunctional solar garden light. I thought it might be interesting to try to build a solar powered mailbox light for my mailbox. I stripped the light fixture down to its basic components: A solar panel, a switch, a battery, and little PCB and a fancy multicoloured LED. I warmed up my trusty old soldering iron and resoldered some parts of the PCB that had come loose, and I replaced the old dead NiCad battery with an old but still alive NiMH battery. Lo and behold, there was light!

And that's pretty much as far as I've got so far. It is very cold outside so it is hard to motivate myself to venture out and start messing around with the mailbox. Plus I'm a little concerned that Canada Post may think I've wired it up to explode or something. Oh well, the important thing is that it's my first project, and it's shiny and stuff.

Technical details: This photo was taken with my 5D Mark II + Tamron 28-75 at 60mm, ISO 3200, f/2.8 for 1/125th of a second.

Comments

Excellent re-use of materials!	
Maybe you can ask your local postal station to
warn the delivery person about the new light.