Now that we have a direction we still have a few questions we needed to hash out. We started answering what we are detecting, mold.
How can you see if something has gone bad, sight, smell, taste, chemical reactions. This seemed to complex and difficult to analyse in one quarter. Maybe a two year research grant and a fully stocked lab could handle that. So we needed to a novel and simple solution to suggest to the user that food had spoiled. We ask ourselves what makes food spoil. Being over 40 degrees for 4 hours. If kept under 40 most food is good for 4 days. With these parameter we decided on a novel solution to manage food spoilage. Time, Type, and Temperature by tracking these we are able to suggest fairly accurately a safe time to eat food stored in tupperware.
This week was really about how and with what we will using to detect these things.
We identified our 3 variables that needed to be addressed.
Time
Luckily the arduino has a built in crystal and we can track the vibrations for that. Since we are only timing for a relative time, its accuracy doesn't need to me militarily accurate. It seems like for this just some nice coding will do the trick.
Temperature
When the food item gets too warm we need to decrease the amount left of the timer. On the market there are plenty of temperature and humidity sensors but the easiest way to achieve what we need is through a thermistor. It tracks the resistance caused by the change in temperature in the resistor and coverts that value to a temperature. Once again a fairly easy sensor with a chunk of coding to pull it all together.
Ambient Light
The last main component we want to track is the ambient light. there is no need to display data if the tupperware is in the fridge an out of sight. For this, on the market are a variety of cheap
light sensors and simple code that we can use.
Now its time to dive into some coding and see if we cant pull it all together.
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