March 5, 2021 - 8:40am
High tech sourdough monitor
SMART LID SPIES ON SOURDOUGH STARTER, SENDS DATA WIRELESSLY
[Justin Lam] created a wonderfully-detailed writeup of his Smart Sourdough Lid project, which was created out of a desire to get better data on the progress and health of his sourdough starters, and to do so more efficiently. The result is a tidy, one-piece lid that constantly measures temperature, humidity, and height of the starter in the jar. Data is sent wirelessly for analysis, but there is also a handy OLED display on the top of the lid that shows immediately useful data like how much the starter has peaked, and how much time has passed since it did so.
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Thanks for sharing this. It seems the plans are open source, although it is still quite a lot of work to put one of these together.
This looks better than the previous version I saw, which used an ultrasonic sensor - not the best for accuracy at these sorts of distances.
However, I'm not sure of the value of these auto SD starter jars; you would normally pretty much know the temperature already if you are using a proofer, RH of questionable value and regarding volume/height, you normally just want to know when the starter has peaked rather than quantitative % increase. I guess it could quickly identify a starter that has gone sluggish.
What I would like to make is an array of ToF sensors embedded in the lid of my bulk fermenting container to show real time % volume increase. This would be calculated from average surface height derived from the sensor array to even out the peaks and troughs of the dough surface.
Unfortuantely my Arduino knowledge can be written on the back of a postage stamp, so this project keeps getting put on the back burner!
Lance