The 'infamous' Oktoberfest of Things part II 2013
At 2013 with Thomas Amberg, we agreed to repeat the experience of the Oktoberfest of Things we enjoyed in 2012. But this time we tried to involve (even) more people during the whole process. For these, we organized a hackathon in Munich the day before of the Oktoferbest of Things 'D' day. Five people joined (physically) us (and some virtually by Twitter) giving us ideas and their support to connect beers to the Internet, it was super interesting.
We built 2 prototypes this year. Thomas iterated his 2012 prototype, that was measuring when the beermass was tilted so we can understand that someone was drinking, with a new Bluetooth Low Energy shield (same than iBeacon). This Bluetooth Low Energy shield was sending the information to the Thomas' mobile device that was connected to the Internet, actually to Xively.
In my case, I built a system that was able to weigh the beermass and sense the weight. If the weight was 0 meaned that someone was drinking or even you ordered a new one (depending on the time with weight=0). This weight sensor was connected to a GSM shield that was sending the information every some minutes to theThings.IO.
We built these prototypes with few hours using our Arduinos and sensors (around 4-6 hours) and the next day we went to the Oktoberfest to enjoy the party and to test our prototypes. It was good to test and showcase to the people around that our beers were connected to the Internet. The problem was that it was friday evening and the Oktoberfest was too crowded so the telephone and 3G signal was so weak to send all of the sensed information to the Internet in real-time.
Thomas showcased the project at the Maker Faire Rome some weeks after the Oktoberfest of Things and even Bruce Sterling could try the Oktoberfest connected beer. Awesome!
Let's work on the 2014 Oktoberfest of Things prototype :)
If you have any comment, don't hesitate to contact me :)
Links
Back to Marc Pous