Awesome Fridge

Sensors and LEDs
Awesome Team

Inspiration

We wanted to do a project with hardware and had to look around in the hack area for something hackable. We found the small RedBull-fridge and wanted to make it a bit smarter. So we added some ultrasonic sensors to detect the cans, a webcam to recognize the user, LEDs and a speaker to be able to talk to the user or sound an alarm if someone did not close the fridge.

How we built it The data from the ultrasonic sensors and temperature is streamed to a server using MQTT. A python script is listening to the data, logs it into a database (aka some files), executes the business logic and sends MQTT-messages to another wifi-arduino that controlls the LEDs and messages to the text-to-speech program. A website is showing some data (how many times which user forgot to close the fridge) and uses the Google-charts api to plot the fridge-temperature and the raw-data from the ultrasonic sensors.

Challenges we ran into

Attaching a lot of sensors to a single arduino,
Using a WIFI-AP from a smartphone that was located in the hack-area so that the fridge didn't work immediately when we moved it to the presentation area.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of