Status Checker

I was sitting in an ice cream shop with my friends after completing a long shoot. We overheard a conversation the shopkeeper was having with his partner about the incident that happened a day before. Later, we realized that he had a massive loss of ice cream because of a sudden and uniformed power cut the night before yesterday. The shop had three chest freezers. No power means no cooling that develops harmful bacteria in ice cream, making it toxic to consume.

I spoke with him about the frequency of the problem. This recurring problem was with almost every ice cream parlor in town. Later, he briefed more about the inconvenience they had in checking the refrigerator's status (whether it is on or off). Shop owners/workers had to come to the parlor even at night just to ensure everything is working fine. Then I asked him why he didn’t install cameras in the shop to see the shop from his house, but it would have been a fortune of a cost for a small shop. Later I posed the thought of investing in smart refrigerators. However, there were no intelligent chest refrigerators available in the market of the size his shop needed. 

I had a chat with my friends, and we said we could solve this problem. At the weekend, we grabbed Arduino, some cables, a breadboard, an ESP8266 module, some batteries, and a laptop to explore the solutions. I designed a circuit that would be installed on the supply line of the refrigerator that would enable long-distance communication to update the status to the user. We started with the ESP8266 module, but we couldn’t establish a reliable connection, so we switched to the GSM module.

We quickly made a simple application that would be used by a user to check the status. We also added a feature of pining the user in case of a power cut. We then gave this solution to the ice cream parlor. 

We loved Ice-cream, and we saved it from wasting.