Good and rare wines have long been known as investments. One reason is that long storage increase the taste of good wines. Futhermore this leads to an increase in value. Storage of wine must take place under certain conditions. In particular, the temperature, the brightness and the humidity are of high relevance. For each of these parameters there is a precisely defined range of tolerance. In addition, it is of particular importance that the temperature is kept as constant as possible. If these storage requirements are not met, the wine will ripen prematurely or even spoil. In consequence it loses its value. It is therefore of great interest to buyers and investors if the optimal storage conditions have been observed at all times.
In order to make verified statements about this, IoT devices can be used. IoT is the Internet of Things and part of Industry 4.0. It connects physical things to the virtual world. Due to the rapid progress in microprocessor technology, IoT devices are becoming ever more powerful and at the same time smaller. The aim is to use the devices to automate work steps autonomously so that entire work processes can run automatically. This can save time and money. Moreover this leads to the rapid spread of IoT technology.
In this exciting and innovative project, such an IoT device for monitoring wine storage was developed. It periodically records the parameters of temperature, brightness and humidity mentioned above. The measurement data is sent to a server via WLAN and visualized on a website. In this way, investors can always find out about the current status of the storage rooms. The device will operate flexibly and independently from the power grid, so the power supply is ensured via a lithium battery. In order to extend the battery life, the microcontroller is put into a deep sleep between measurements.
As part of a student project, an ESP32 was programmed for this purpose, which interacts with the DHT22 and BH1750 sensors. For this purpose, the system was set up on a breadboard as a test and the functionality was checked. A prototype for real applications was then created, which already aroused great interest from a company during the student work.