Updated 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 |
| (increases linearly with amount of beer consumed) | |
| 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
- turn that information into your personal refrigerator dashboard that you can access on your laptop or mobile device using Initial State
- setup your own beer inventory alerts (email+SMS)
This tutorial is the first in a new series, “Learning How to Build Real IoT Applications” >>
12 comments On Tutorial: Beer/Wine Fridge of Awesomeness
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Hi,
Thanks for the great tutorial. Did you ever get anywhere with making the pairing of the Wii Fit and the RasPi more streamlined (ie without having to push the button)?
I never could make permanent pairing work. I certainly pulled my hair out trying though.
Hi There
I might have found a solution to your problem 🙂
Stavros seems to have found a way to have it permanently synced to his ubuntu machine.
http://www.stavros.io/posts/your-weight-online – check the edit part at the bottom of the article
“I have finally managed to get the Wii Board to successfully (and permanently) pair with my Ubuntu computer. Here are the steps:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libdbus-1-dev check checkinstall to install the dependencies.
apt-get source bluez to get the source.
Apply this patch to actually get it to recognize hex pin codes.
./configure –enable-test, make
sudo checkinstall to create a .deb you can remove after pairing.
Restart your computer/bluetooth services/etc.
./test/simple-agent hciX ##:##:##:##:##:##, you need to change hciX to whatever your Bluetooth adapter is (usually hci0, find it with hcitool dev). The hashes are the Balance Board’s Bluetooth address.
Your pin is now $FFEEDDCCBBAA, where AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF is your Bluetooth adapter’s bluetooth address. Just reverse the order of the octets, so 01:23:45:67:89:AB becomes $ab8967452310.
Your balance board will pair, and you have to immediately connect to it with python gr8w8upd8m8.py ##:##:##:##:##:##, or it might not pair.
If you missed the connecting step above, run ./test/simple-agent hciX ##:##:##:##:##:## remove and try again.
To trust the device so it will connect in the future, run bt-device –set ##:##:##:##:##:## Trusted 1”
I tried this and never could get a successful pairing even when I patched bluez to accept hex pin codes. No hex pin code I used would work.
OK, I feel less dumb now. Pulled my hair out on this one, too. SHEESH.
The fridge in the picture, what brand is it? It’s exactly what I’m looking for. Any information you could provide on the fridge in the picture would be greatly appreciated.
The fridge used is listed in the Equipment section of the tutorial. It is a Frigidaire 4.6-cu ft Stainless Steel Freestanding Beverage Center: http://www.lowes.com/pd_591037-47224-FFBC46L2QS_1z11pmp__
LOL, and what is the beer you are drinking in the video?
That was a Harpoon Long Thaw White IPA. All six of those were delicious.
Now this is one great tutorial! Thanks for this one. Getting a beer or wine inventory alert in a personal mobile device sounds great! Right from tracking who’s stealing wine or beer from my fridge to the number of bottles I consumed, I could keep a tab on all, with the help of this tutorial. Amazing step-by-step guide! It really does make a beer or wine fridge super-advanced! It is no less than a fridge for the next gen. An awesome and hi-tech fridge with email/SMS alerts, something which I could not have thought of, without such a blog. Thanks again!
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