CigarSaver

Hello, my name is Thibault D'Haese and i am a student at Howest Kortrijk. I'm currently in my first year of Multimedia and Communication Technology.

At the end of the year we had to make an IoT-project. For this project I came up with the idea to make a humidor that sends all its measured data to a website. For my device i chose an obvious name, CigarSaver.

Below you can read all the necessary steps that I've had to go through in order to bring the project to a succesfull outcome.

For my project I used a lot of different components to be able to bring everything to a good end. The components that i used are listed below. The total cost for this project was around €233.

Components:

• Raspberry Pi 4 model B
• Raspberry Pi power supply
• Raspberry Pi T-cobbler
• 32GB micro SD card
• Breadboard
• Temperature Sensor ~ DS18B20
• Humidity Sensor ~ DHT11
• Magnetic door switch
• 5K Resistors
• LCD 16x2
• Stepper motor ~ 28BYJ-48
• ULN2003 Driver
• Active buzzer
• Female to Female jumper wires
• Male to Male jumper wires
• Female to Male jumper wires

Materials:

• Wood
• Plexiglass
• Door handle

Tools:

• Industrial wood saw
• Electric saw
• Electric screwdriver
• Soldering Iron
• Drill

In the excel file below you can see the complete price list of all my materials.

After i figured out every component, I started to create a entity relationship diagram.

With my database you are able to see:

• The current value if the door is open or not
• When the door has been opened
• History of the temperature and the current temperature
• History of the humidity percentage and the current humidity percentage

I hosted my Database on my RPi using MariaDB.

After everything was figured out, it was time to put together my hardware. First i did this virtually with the computer so i could not do anything wrong which could cause a short circuit.

For creating this scheme i used the program fritzing.

Once my fritzing scheme was finished and I was satisfied with it, I started putting together my hardware. I started with my temperature and humidity sensor. I did that because the sensors looked the easiest to me. The door sensor was the last thing i did of the sensors because it still had to be delivered.

After the sensors were done, I did my LCD. This wasn't that hard anymore because I have switched and encoded it already in the past.

The last step was to connect my actuators. The first actuator I connected was my buzzer. Once I succeeded I switched to the last actuator, namely, my stepper motor

You can find my code on github.

In order to be able to display all the data measured by my sensors i decided to make a design in Adobe XD which I will later convert to an actual website. Through the website you can also control the humidity percentage of the humidor.

Then it was time to make my enclosure. For my materials I went to the Brico and bought wood an plexiglass. I made the outside of my box from wood that i had cut by a carpenter. On the inside I put my plexiglass so you can easily see the electronic components if something went wrong.

My code can be found on github right here.