I have this neat coffee mug that uses thermal paint to show how full it is. Its more cute than practical. Looking at my cup one day while thinking about internets and things, this project formed into my mind along with a question. Can I tell how full a coffee cup is by just temperatures? Because if I know that, I can figure out how much and how fast I drink coffee. Which means I can figure out how much caffeine I’ve had, and then how long it sticks around in my body.

I set off to find out.

(This project is in progress. I’ll update this page as I get things figured out.)

The Plan

Being that this was going to get attached to a coffee mug, it needed to be wireless. I had two Moteinos that I bought for another project that got put on hold. Now the temperature sensor; I’m not quite sure what the name for this is, but I’ve been going with Linear Temperature Array. Buying six 1-Wire sensors was a bit more than I wanted to spend, and analog is easy enough, so I just picked up six TMP36. I also grabbed some food-grade heat shrink because I assumed that the temperature sensors needed to be as close to the coffee as possible.

This Moteino will be broadcasting back to another acting as a gateway. That one will be connected to a BeagleBone white, also from that other project. The bone will be running a script to take the data from the Moteino and sending it to the internet cloud. I choose to use Exosite because of employment bias.

Building the Mug Sensors

First step was doing a bunch of point soldering to make my Linear Temperature Array.
<img src=”/projects/images/CICO-LinearTemperatureArray-thumb.jpg” alt=”Six TMP36 point soldered in a row” >

Since I wanted to do some tests on what kind and quality of data I got back I kept the Moteino on a breadboard with way too much wire between that and the sensors. I will be at some point here trimming that down and having everything connected to the cup.

First, I did some tests with the sensors on the outside of the cup. If this got good enough data, that would be cleaner than putting them in the cup. (it didn’t.)
Sensors mounted on the outside of the cup

So, some hot glue for strength and heat shrunk.
Sensors wrapped in heat shrink tubing

And into the coffee:
Sensors inside cup with coffee

Then finally cut the wires short and soldered them in.
Wires cut to length and soldered to Moteino
(Still gotta figure out the battery holder…)

Building the Gateway

This is pretty straightforward; connect the UARTs.

Mess of wires for initial gateway
(ignore the BLE dongle for now.)

In the Cloud

Having exoline installed makes many tasks with the Exosite platform easier. For me its much quicker to write a spec file, and have exoline apply it onto a new CIK.

Mobile

Because I can, I’m also building an iOS app. iOS app and coffee mug next to each other with matching bars

Data

These are plots of the temperature difference between the top-most sensor and the lower ones.
Plot showing temperature differences with sensors outside the cup Plot showing temperature differences with sensors inside the cup

There is a clear dip in temperature difference when the sensors are inside the mug. When on the outside, the ceramic interferes too much blurring all the values together.