Is it too cold and damp? Part 1: Requirements

Part 1: Requirements

In our previous article, we finally unveiled our Open Source Wireless Environmental Sensor. If you missed it looks like this:

Is that the Open Source Hardware logo I see on the board? You ask.

You bet!

What does it do?

It is a rechargeable battery-operated wireless sensor that can measure:

• Temperature with ±1.0°C accuracy
• Barometric pressure with 1 hPa absolute accuracy
• Humidity with ±3% accuracy

Now that we have a nice piece of hardware we need to do something fun with it. During our spring conference, our colleague Christopher W came up with an exciting product idea for the environmental sensor…

Sometime later we asked Christoper to present his requirements during one of our monthly meetings and to describe the problem. This article is based on his presentation and product ideas.

Problem statement

Some expensive musical instruments made of wood such as the viola da gamba hate being too wet, too dry or too hot. As a musician, you want to store your instrument in the best possible environment but monitoring the environment is a bit tedious, especially if you have an analogue meter like a hygrometer.

Viola da Gamba, picture courtesy of Christopher W

Current solution

There are several modern takes on solving the problem like D’Addario Humiditrak Bluetooth Humidity and Temperature Sensor or Gigs by BAM — Case tracking device.

The classical solution is a hygrometer (measuring airborne humidity) inside the case. You see the gauge inside the lid of this case:

Viola case with a hygrometer, picture courtesy of Christopher W

Requirements

Here are Christopher’s requirements:

As a musician; I would like …

• To be able to specify average temperature and humidity limits for the different time periods (2 hours, 1 day, 7 days, 28 days)
• Wider limits are acceptable for limited times — I must expect my instruments to be exposed to higher or lower temperatures and/or humidity for a couple of hours on their way to be played somewhere else, but not for too long.
• To receive an alert by SMS or e-mail if the limits are exceeded

Summary

We got a brief introduction to the next phase of our project. We are going to use our open-source sensor to secure that the storage environment for our musical instruments is optimal i.e. not too wet, not too dry or too hot.

In our next article, we will start to design the software and show you the software architecture.

Thank you for reading! Take care and hope to see you soon. 🙏🏽

This article is a living document please reach out to me if you want to contribute or see anything inaccurate here. This article is part of our “Boosting Innovation” project.