Applied MCU technology for consumers...of beer!

Over at Energy Micro in Nydalen, Norway, they like a cold beer. So much so, that they're using one of their Gecko MCU development kits to tell them what temperature their beers are.

Says Digital Design Engineer Alf:

"This project was conceived during after-hours on the roof of our office in Nydalen, where we were sitting in the sun splitting a case of beer. The problem was that the sun was heating the beer and in order to minimize the heating of each beer, we wanted to know which beer in the case was hottest and thus was the next in line to drink. A second specification for the automatic beer-case was that we wanted an alarm going off whenever a beer was about to get too hot for drinking, so we could down it immediately.

"We therefore bought 24 LM35 Precision Centigrade analog temp-sensors and mounted them on top of some insulation-material (dish washing sponges) in the bottom of the beer case and routed all the wires back to an EFM Giant Gecko Development Kit. The code was put together during an afternoon and is mainly a patchwork of the graphics examples with some ADC-readings thrown in."