When cooking foods, we think to ourselves as to how long do we have until the food is cooled down? When we think of it being cooled, we may think about the point where it may be acceptable to what we would like to consume at or a point where it is too cold. For our IOT Project, we decided to test the overall duration of how long a bag of freshly popped popcorn lasts. The main goal is to determine the overall timeframe of a popped bag of popcorn is to be.
Video
To perform this project, we will have a Temperature and Humidity Sensor in the bag and another similar set on the outside. The outside sensor is used to collect a control set of data meanwhile the inside sensor is used to collect data of the bag.
DHT11
The DHT Sensor is used to collect the Temperature and the Humidity in the surrounding area. We are going to be using two of them, one to collect data within the freshly popped bag and the other to collect the ambient data.
ButtonThe Button sensor is used to initiate the overall testing procedure. It is placed somewhere easily accessible on the board to tell the circuit to start collecting data.
SchematicsHow does it work?
So we have two circuit builds, Ambient and Popcorn, from these two they will be placed accordingly as their jobs are in their titles. Ambient will be placed somewhere in the same room as the Popcorn to collect the ambient temperature and humidity to have a control environment. Next, Popcorn's DHT Sensor will be placed inside of the freshly popped popcorn where it can collect the temperature and humidity inside of the bag, there will be a hole for it to slip into so eventually the heat will begin to die down as it is slowly being cooled by the environment. Once both circuits are placed and powered, we began the testing sequence via a button on the Circuit that will begin collecting data.
Collecting the DataWhen collecting the data, the data is being collected at an interval of 20 seconds. The collected data is then uploaded into the ThingSpeak cloud where it compiles the data into a graph, depicting either the progressive cooling of the popcorn or the ambient temperature in the room we are performing this experiment in. Below is a diagram that describes the general direction of data traffic that is traveling from the Sensors and Argons towards the live data connection service, ThingSpeak.
Finalized Build
Popcorn Bag
Ambient Temperature
The data had some weird errors here and there but the one thing that we can see from the Popcorn Data was that the best time to eat the Popcorn is within 10 minutes. Anything beyond that, the Popcorn becomes mushy and unsatisfactory.
Credits
Thanks to DHT11 Sensor Interfacing with Particle Photon on electronicwing's site: https://www.electronicwings.com/particle/dht11-sensor-interfacing-with-particle-photon
and Zachary Haslam's Project for the DHT-11 and it's code: https://www.hackster.io/techno_z/dht11-temperature-humidity-sensor-98b03b
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