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UPDATE March 7, 2016: New bonus section on adding beer alerts/notifications
How do you take a perfectly good beer or wine fridge and make it awesome? A good start is to have your refrigerator tell you how many bottles are in it, when the door is open or closed, and the temperature inside your fridge. What is even better is to have that information available to you at all times on your laptop, tablet, and phone. You can know when your 17-year-old nephew steals your beer. You can know just how many beers you drank last month. You can know if you need to restock while you are walking down the store aisle.
Thanks to new, simple-to-use Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, anyone can transform their beer or wine fridge into the envy of the neighborhood in a matter of minutes.
Project level: Beginner
Approximate time to complete: 30 minutes
Data points produced per month: 50,000
In this step-by-step tutorial, you will:
- setup a Wii balance board as a scale to detect the number of bottles inside your refrigerator
- wire up a door sensor to detect when your refrigerator door is open or closed
- wire up a temperature sensor to capture the temperature inside your refrigerator
- use a Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org) to stream this captured information to a cloud service (https://www.initialstate.com)
- turn that information into your personal refrigerator dashboard that you can access on your laptop or mobile device
- setup your own beer inventory alerts (email+SMS)