Experimental Incubator/history

Here you can find an overview of the experimental incubator (ei) project past, enjoy the read.

2010 - beginning. The experimental incubator was first discussed and tempered with at Noisebridge around 2010 in the group which focused on food and beverage hacking, especially fermentations. We did not get too far but still we have done some experimenting with Arduino, calibrating the temperature probes (thermistors) and measuring temperature with them, transferring the data to the computer. The brain as mentioned was Arduino micro controller, all work done under the Linux. In this time Mario, Benie, Fabian, Mike, Glen and Algoldor were involved mostly.

2011 - winter - during the visit of ChaosKueste on invitation of Sven, the crew there build for me a simple control element which allowed me to switch on and off the heating element through Arduino based on the temperature sensor and reading, the code got unfortunately lost and device broken during the travels. However it was the first functioning control element to my memory in my holding (Algoldor).

2012 - summer - I have been involved in Susubori Academy brewing laboratory and educational center and I have build with a help an experimental incubator there. I did the hardware - box/chamber and the cooling and heating system. The control unit, electronics and programming was done by Mr. Paek kwang woong (백광웅), many thanks! More info about this prototype can be found here. For overview Arduino was used as a brain, temperature sensor to detect the temperature and heating and cooling was achieved by peltier devices. I have to say that the cooling was not really effective, the top temperature for heating was around 42C.

2012 - winter - during my visit of C-Base I have met Mic, who engineered and programmed for me a control element based again on Arduino and this time printed circuit board (pcb). The code can be found here and pictures below. Many thanks to Mic for this, I hope to advance on it when we meet again. I have to say to be honest that there were some issues with the board which I did not managed to solve at the time so I did not use it at the end but still have it ready with me.

2013 - spring - after the CCC event my friend Arnd put together a concept based on the industrial prototyping scheme, you can find more info here. I need to decide on exact parts and order them so we can build several functional prototypes, hopefully in different places, coordinating the activities.

2013 - autumn - getting in touch with Greg, Arnd and several other people, we are moving forward on the project. We started to discuss the concept on forum founded by Greg called Aeonfarm and by emails, posting the details to the newly build food hacking base wikies - Prototype designing. The aim is to order the necessary parts for build up of 5-10x control units and working on them before and during the 30c3 in Hamburg, promoting them on the subsequent food hacking tour around Europe.