DIY Gatorade Bottle

John Keefe, in his blog, has discussed a conductivity and temperature sensor, which text data from inside a Gatorade bottle.This gadget comprises of Riffle, a Fona cell-phone board, and a bottle. Riffle is an Arduino-like board, majorly designed to fit through the mouth of a water bottle. The plan is to deploy some sensors in the river.

One of its major component, Riffle, is the brain of this project and closely resembles the brain of an Arduino Uno. Hence, all adjustments are done with a standard Uno except for the fitting this in a bottle. It is fitted out with a USB port and is used for uploading code just like with an Arduino. A Mac laptop users cannot detect it on the USB port and therefore special drivers need to be installed for the USB chip Riffle uses.

For a better understanding of the Fona Setup, Adafruit provides a tutorial for the same. A compatible SIM card would be required for this purpose. Texting the data in the river can be an exciting prospect but this is a work in progress project. The project is doable and hence you can adjust it according to your whims. Further, this DIY gadget is comparatively inexpensive.

This project leaves room for a wide scope of improvement and there are various concepts, which is yet to be calibrated. Whether it is related to finding the conductivity values or discovering ways to keep bottle cap waterproof, requires more experiments. Then, it is also difficult to find a decent 2G cell service everywhere and using 32-ounce Gatorade bottle seems small as they have smaller mouths, and therefore Fona won’t fit in it.Look down for the project for better details and experiment purpose to the following website. You can also contribute to further improvement of this project.