For our Instrumentation IoT project we were to come up with a project that would make our lives easier. Recently I have been dealing with going to get a drink out of the fridge only to find that they were all gone. Refill alert is a system to notify you when you are low on drinks or when someone has taken a drink without asking you first.
How It WorksA PIR motion sensor is attached to a breadboard that has a photon on it. We put an led light on the board to let us know that our sensor is working in case the alarm doesn't sound. The sensor and led were wired to a photon that is powered by a power bank.
When the sensor detects motion the photon will publish an event to the particle cloud. (Note: If the photon is placed in a refrigerator it may lose wifi. For me it only took about 5-10 seconds for the wifi to re-establish after opening the door. You may want to lengthen your motion sensor wires and only put the sensor inside the fridge, with the photon attached outside the door for optimum performance.)
The second photon will get the first photons published event and will set off an alarm. The alarm will continue on a loop until the button is pushed to void the loop. The second photon setup has a photon hooked to a power bank, buzzer, and tactical push button all attached to a breadboard. The second photon is placed near the extra drinks so that when you go to turn off the alarm, you can grab some drinks to refill your fridge.
We set up two different applets on IFTTT (IF This Then That). One applet is made up of the Particle and Notification apps to send a notification to the users phone when the second photon publishes an event. This allows you to see if anyone is drinking your drinks without your permission. The other applet works with the Particle and Google Drive apps to add a string of data to the users Google Sheets in Google Drive. This allows you to see a graph that includes the date, time and how often a drink is being taken.
This data was taken as we were working on the project. I promise I did not drink 40 drinks in 5 minutes, but that would be impressive.
Watch the video below to see how it works!
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