The Christmas Present Peeker Trap uses an ESP32 Cam board, photoresistor, buzzer, and connected app to catch even the sneakiest of gift glimpsers

Are you a maker and suspect that you have a festive sneak‑a‑looker in your home? Well, the Makerinator has returned with the perfect project for you, dubbed the (Christmas) Present Peeker Trap. In brief, it’s a couple of microcontrollers, connected to a camera, photoresistor, buzzer, and software stack to send SMS, save video to the cloud, and serve a video of the dastardly peeker, wrapped nicely in a dedicated app.

The Makerinator introduces the project by describing the issue it is designed to address and voicing his strong suspicions about Mrs. Inator.

The idea is cunning, but you have to think like a fox to catch a fox. In simple terms, when a present peeker opens a gift box to glance at its secret-til-Christmas contents, the light entering the box hits a photoresistor. This triggers a series of events to record the guilty party and send an alert and a video to the Makerinator’s mobile app.

In practice, it took several days of frustration, fiddling, and tweaking on both hardware and software fronts of the maker equation before everything worked as it should.

If you watch the video above, the Makerinator will walk you through the Present Peeker Trap creation process, from selecting the initial components and coding, to adding more components and coding again, to quashing wiring bugs and coding again, before testing the trap.

It turns out that the original plan of simply using a single microcontroller and cheap camera sensor wasn’t viable. Thus, subsequent iterations of this project swapped out the camera to one that was capable enough to show a face without a full set of studio lights shining directly at it. Moreover, the ESP32 Cam board alone was too puny to handle all the work, so Makerinator added an Arduino Nano clone to handle photoresistor sensing and buzzer functionality.

During a demonstration, which we strongly suspect didn’t feature the real Mrs. Inator (or Santa), the finished Christmas Present Peeker Trap worked as follows:

• Mrs. Inator can’t resist Christmas parcel peeking, so she opens up the Christmas Present Peeker Trap box that was left unattended.
• The photoresistor sensor reacts to the flood of light and sets off the buzzer.
• A text message is sent to the Makerinator’s phone.
• A ten-second video clip is recorded, saved onto a microSD card, and uploaded to the cloud.
• The text message has a link which, when clicked, opens up the custom Christmas Present Peeker Trap mobile app.
• The app allows the Makerinator to identify and watch the reaction of the guilty present peeker.
• A copy of the video is also sent to Santa at the North Pole, so Mrs. Inator will be added to the naughty list.

Overall, it is another fun, quirky, and borderline useful project from the Makerinator, who last starred within our pages with a project that automated restaurant, chore, date night, and movie night choices. Dubbed the Decisionator, that project was claimed to be a marriage saver. However, the appearance of ‘Mrs. Inator’ in this new video leads us to wonder if the marriage really was saved.

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