The other day I opened my deep freeze to discover everything inside slowly melting. The freezer had tripped the GFCI on the circuit, and silently turned off.
I don’t keep a lot of food in there, so there’s no real reason for a freezer alarm that will ping me when the temperature rises, but it was a great excuse to buy and tinker with an Arduino.
Here’s where I’m at so far:
It’s composed of:
* An Arduino Uno.
* A CC3000 wireless shield.
* A DHT-22 temperature and humidity sensor.
*(Oh, by the way: you have to solder Arduino shields!)*
Thanks to my colleague Dave Par’s wifi weather station code, I had it up and running pretty quickly. The code reads the temperature and humidity every three minutes, and sends the data to dweet.io.
The next step is to turn that data into an alert. I’ve tried textbelt.com, so far with no luck; my next idea is to have an App Engine app polling the data and emailing me if the temp passes a preset level.
More to come.