Team Name
Team Hydrometer
Timeline
Summer 2020 – Fall 2020
Students
- Rebecca Byun
- Gam Garbuja
- Ryan Tyler
- Andrew Duong
Abstract
Fermenting beer at a particular temperature is an important brewing process to achieve certain taste and thickness of beer. Bluetooth Hydrometer is a device to help brewers to keep track of temperature and specific density of beer during the fermentation process. Bluetooth Hydrometer floats inside the fermentation vessel and sends data to a smartphone via Bluetooth which can help brewers immensely.
Bluetooth Hydrometer utilizes 9-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) and temperature sensor in Arduino Nano BLE sense board to get temperature and specific gravity data. Arduino board also provides Bluetooth functionality to transfer data between smartphone and Arduino board.
Background
The purpose behind this project was to provide an alternative, budget solution to a brewing hydrometer. There are purchasable hydrometers such as Tilt™, but such commercial hydrometers are significantly more expensive. In the brewing process, when yeast is added to wort and left to ferment, the density of the liquid changes as it ferments to beer. Hydrometers are crucial to the brewing process, as they give specific data sets that have very little room for error, such as the temperature and the specific gravity (density), which determines the type of the brew and if the brew is usable at all. Hydrometers are also usually calibrated to work with a specific temperature, as density and specific gravity changes depending on the temperature of the brew.
Project Requirements
Following are the requirements for Bluetooth Hydrometer:
- Hydrometer shall be able to measure temperature precisely with minimum error.
- Hydrometer shall be able to measure the tilt angle and specific gravity precisely with minimum error.
- Temperature and specific gravity data shall be transferred to a smartphone app via Bluetooth.
- The smartphone app must accept the Bluetooth connection from the hydrometer with a click of a button without issue.
- Hydrometer shall be kept in a waterproof and air-tight container.
- Hydrometer shall be able to float inside the fermentation vessel and send the required data without any interference and error.
- Hydrometer shall not contaminate the ferment in any way.
- Hydrometer battery shall last during the entire period of fermentation process.
- The smartphone app has a minimalist and simple-to-use user interface, having only buttons to choose the device to pair with.
- Hydrometer shall continuously keep and output real-time temperature values and tilt angles, either posted to the serial monitor or through the LEDs.
System Overview
Sensors
Arduino nano BLE consists of built-in sensors, temperature sensor and 9-axis IMU sensor. Temperature and IMU sensor measures temperature and specific gravity data of ferment during fermentation process which is transferred to a smartphone via Bluetooth.
Controllers
Arduino nano BLE is the heart of Bluetooth Hydrometer. It is low powered embedded device; it reads temperature and IMU data from temperature sensor and IMU sensor. Arduino IDE provides libraries to read temperature and IMU data, IMU data is modified to find the angle to tilt and calculate specific gravity. Temperature and specific gravity data are sent to smartphone via Bluetooth.
UI/UX
Users can get temperature and specific gravity data on a smartphone app. Bluetooth App handles incoming data from Arduino and provides a graphical/visual user interface. Android studio is used to create a Bluetooth app for our Hydrometer.
Results
Demonstration video (link)
- Hydrometer can accurately measure temperature and IMU data.
- Hydrometer can transfer data from the Arduino to a smartphone via Bluetooth.
- Hydrometer displays whether the temperature and tilt angles are in the correct ranges by using onboard LEDs. Blue indicates temperature satisfaction, green indicates tilt angle satisfaction, and red indicates that neither conditions were met.
- Smartphone app has Bluetooth backend threads implemented.
Future Work
- Bluetooth Integration can be handled efficiently to create Android App.
- Specific gravity measurement can be done more precisely to get angle of tilt some Filter (using Complementary Filter for IMU sensor data).
Project Files
Project Charter (link)
System Requirements Specification (link)
Architectural Design Specification (link)
Detailed Design Specification (link)
Poster (link)
Source Code (link)
LaTex Files (link)
References
N/A
