FoodBeacon

Though I planned on designing a PCB from scratch for the HDC1000 sensor, I found the amazing work Francesco Truzzi did (http://b.truzzi.me/hdc1000-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-breakout-with-arduino-library/) in designing a neat tiny breakout board for HDC1000.

I did some size reduction and sent it to OSHpark and the PCB's arrived yesterday.


I soon got started to solder teeny HDC1000 sensor, The BGA package turned out to be quite a challenge to our amateur SMD soldering skills.


After a few dead boards, We got a working one!


The reason we chose this HDC1000 chip was because of the capacitive sensing technique TI has used, Making it suitable for our rugged & Weather protected design.
Though TI has pushed it to not recommended for new designs, We would be working on the HDC1010 variant soon!

To get a grab hold of the data and notify us in certain conditions, we planned to interface the raspberry pi3 to the NODE-RED online platform.
By doing so we can program it to send the obtained data directly to our e-mail on pre determined conditions.

For example if the temperature of the refrigerated meat is over a certain threshold, An alert can be triggered to notify the relevant personnel.
Here is a actual view of the online NODE - RED platform to connect the datas from raspberry pi3 to our e-mail.

We had to do some programming to keep our device running perfectly ,so that the email service is being triggered on apt conditions

Below here is the actual snippet of the coding to set up a threshold value as a trigger point.

On deploying the code we were finally able to finish the loop of getting data ,using raspberry pi3 as gateway device by communicating with the cloud to get data logs on client's devices.

Here is our final hardware for this setup

We have used a HTU21 for now with our system though we want to use a HDC1000 with our FoodBeacon due to it's capacitive sensing technique which would enable us make our sensor air sealed in it's design to increase reusablity.

Hooking up to the lightblue bean was rather easy and we soldered a 4-pin JST connector to the blue bean.

Thanks to the code compatablity of the lightblue bean, We were able to get the Humidity and Temperature sensing up and running.
Here is a snapshot of the data

We also decided to get some datapoints in a container in the fridge,

(Internet of Chillies)

For the implementation of the project we chose to use BLE for communication due to ultra low power and the backbone already established by iBeacons.

The LightBlue bean despite being expensive was chosen for the prototype due to it's insanely small size and inbuilt cr2032 battery.
The code was compatible with Arduino, So it would be easier to develop our application.
The sensors we chose to work on our first revision is the HTU21 humidity sensor and a MICS5524 sensor.
The data would be read by a Raspberry Pi3 which would be a gateway device to upload the data to a cloud service like Thingspeak or Node-Red.
For the first prototype we want to implement our idea and record the sensor data and find out the issues to iterate our design.

A sketch of our implementation is attached below.

The idea was conceptualized a few days back when I read a newspaper article on the wide spread food spoilage even during drought conditions in my state.

The cause was identified as fungal infection in grains and spread of salmonella in meat due to improper refrigeration. Doing some research I was unable find a connected sensor solution to detect and monitor food spoilage and rot.

I decided to build my own low cost BLE based mesh sensor that can either be dropped inside grain sack to monitor relative humidity or set alongside meat packaging to detect volatile organic compounds emitted during decay.

I hope that this project can bring attention to food spoilage and by optimizing the food supply chain using FoodBeacons it is my belief that not only accountability will result in safer and fresher food but also overall food wastage would be minimized.

Food surplus was a gift given by our ancestors and it is something we must take utmost care when millions starve worldwide.

(Food wastage estimate: http://modernfarmer.com/2013/09/next-food-revolution-youre-eating/)