Francisco Bianor
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Science and Technology and Mechatronic Engineering - UFRN
Daniel Fernandes
Science and Technology - UFRN
Alek Tobias
Science and Technology and Computing Engineering - UFRN
The first thing that need to be explained is what is Raffe
Raffe is a craft beer brewery from Natal, RN, Brazil, and they, with Instituto Metropole Digital, organized a hackathon to approximate the industry to the labs.
Monitoring the production process
Monitoring the final product
Smart branding
Monitoring the production process
To understand the needs in the production process we spoke with the brewmaster, he sugested sensors to analyze turbidity and temperature of the beer while fermenting.
Bianor and me (Daniel) developed a box with those two sensors, while Bianor put together the prototypes, i did the 3d models.
We used just a laser and a LDR, if the LDR reading is a high number it means that the liquid is clear.
Monitoring the final product
Raffe is focusing on selling kegs with pressurised beer, and they wanted to know how the bars are storing and using Raffes's kegs, because storing their beer in warm places affect it's quality, or plugin the tap multiple times and serving little amount per night.
So we developed a device that knows the temperature and how many times the bar plug and unplug the tap.
The keg from Raffe comes with the device already attached and it connects with the bar wifi, the tap is pluged on top of the device and it knows that is pluged via a button, also there is a button between the keg and the device to know if the device was removed.
Smart branding was one of the most required from Raffe, the brand is new and they need to reach more people. Thinking on that we decided to develop an augmented reality app.
I made a simple app with Unity and Vuforia that the consumer points the camera to the label and see 3D models and text about that beer. Or it can be used with the business card to see Raffe's logo.
But how about the system?
Let me explain how all of it are connected.
The first thing is a desktop app that i made in Electron that receives the data about the production in real time via serial from an Arduino.
It shows the data received from the sensors and from time to time sends those data to a Firebase database. It also has a QrCode generator for the mobile app.
The mobile app was made by Alek with Ionic and it is a management app with all the data from the kegs in other bars and the fermenting tanks, with the additional of a stock management, the qrcode is generated for labeling the ingredients and with the app the brewmaster can remove itens from the stock just pointing the camera to the Qrcode.
We made all those things in two days and everything is working as expected. We finished in third, but Raffe's owners liked our solutions and we are developing, with them, new versions of the sensoring device for the final product and a new app with augmented reality.
