We know that some countries like to brew beer, and to our big surprise, we saw an IoT LinkIt powered wine maker demonstrated at the MediaTek booth.
MediaTek labs started a year ago and they introduced a MediaTek LinkIt ONE development platform. The company calls it an ultimate developer board for wearables and Internet of Things (IoT). We got a chance to see the Smart Brewer that is monitoring a critical process of making wine from grapes or cider from apples. We had a chance to see the demo with Marc Naddell, vice president of MediaTek Labs, who could not hide his enthusiasm about some of LinkIt ONE real world applications. We even got to try the product.
Wine making is a long process that takes some 21 days and these young entrepreneurs are using the IoT LinkIt platform to monitor the process. LinkIt platform enables brewers to upload real time data to MediaTek power Cloud Sandbox and read the data from a tablet or a smartphone even tens of thousands of miles away. We tried the apple wine, this is how they cider in Taiwan, and we can confirm it tasted similar to young wine that we get to try in Winviertel wine country just outside of Vienna, Austria.
The platform comes with a Bluetooth module that you use for initial setup and you use on board Wi-Fi for cloud connectivity. The Smart Brewer also comes with a barometric pressure and temperature sensor, alcohol vapour sensor, PH meter as well as a CO2 sensor. The smart brewer supports wireless charging and comes with Ultraviolet LED for equipment sterilisation. You need to closely follow these parameters to make good wine.
The way the Smart Brewer works is that the IoT module with sensors is sitting on top of the wine container, filled with grapes or apple.
The Smart Brewer turns every few hours, checks the parameters such as PH value, temperature or the CO2 value that are known to be critical for wine making. In case that the LinkIt platform detects that some values are off, it notifies you that you need to decrease the temperature or add some ingredients to fine tune in order to get the best possible quality.
The fact that the platform needs to measure and sends these data only a few times a day, the battery life of the solution is an astonishing one year and even if it runs out of battery it will have a wireless charging. The young team from the start up called Alchema think that they can have a commercial product in 2016.
This is a home based brewer solution but it is easy to imagine that there might be an interest from some bigger wine producers that needs to monitor the process and want to get the real time data on their smartphone. This is one of the cool application of LinkIt ONE developer board and these guys managed to turn this developer board powered by a 32-bit ARM 7EJ-S RISC 260MHz processor, and its connectivity modules which as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, into an innovative real world device.
MediaTek's developer board branded as LinkIt ONE comes with 1000 mAh battery, GSM, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Antenna port as well as GPS antenna port. If you need more connectivity Grove Starter Kit comes with UV, Dust, temperature, barometer and accelerometer and comes with a Wi-Fi / Bluetooth Antenna, and many others is sells for $69.99. The cheaper option called Sidekick Basic Kit for LinkIt ONE that is meant to be used with the LinkIt ONE board and it is selling for $29.99. There were more IoT demos including a smart connected scooter, wearable medical belt, smart shoes, children tracking device that we will tell you all about soon.
