Project 06 · TAC 348 · Connected Devices

Smart Box — IoT Sensor Platform

TAC 348 · Connected Devices · University of Southern California

Particle IoT Blynk C++ / Arduino Sensor Integration OLED Display Cloud Dashboard Webhooks Initial State

Demo Video

Smart Box full functionality walkthrough — sensor readings, OLED display, Blynk dashboard, and cloud data pipeline.

Project Overview

The Smart Box is an IoT-enabled smart monitoring system built around the Particle Photon 2 microcontroller platform. The device was designed to monitor a physical mailbox — detecting new mail delivery events, tracking environmental conditions, and streaming live data to cloud dashboards in real time.

Sensor integration includes a DHT20 temperature and humidity sensor, an ultrasonic distance sensor for proximity detection (mail detection), and a 0.96" OLED display for on-device readouts. A pulse sensor wearable was also implemented with a smartwatch-style UI showing live heart rate data on the OLED.

On the software side, the firmware was written in C++ (Arduino-style) using the Particle device OS. Data is published via Particle webhooks that forward events to Initial State for historical charting and to a Blynk dashboard for real-time mobile visualization. Blynk datastreams were configured for temperature, humidity, distance, and a mail-received event flag.