Monitor your fridge door with Arduino

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With this simple hack, you can receive alerts whenever your refrigerator door is open.

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We’ve all heard of the IoT, and many probably wonder what exactly that means. Sure, connecting your toaster to the Internet is interesting, but not useful for everyone. On the other hand, there are certainly devices that people would like to connect to “the cloud,” but are not capable of doing so by default. Filling in this gap is MySensors, which describes itself as “IoT + DIY.” Put another way, it’s an open source system of libraries for the Arduino using a transceiver to communicate with the world.

As seen on the MySensors forum, one useful example for this would be to monitor whether or not your refrigerator is properly closed. The brainchild of Pete Will, the setup for this is relatively simple using an Arduino Pro Mini (ATmega328) with two temperature sensors and a NRF24l01 transceiver. Temperature sensors go in both the freezer and refrigerator, as well as strips of copper formed to complete a circuit when the door is closed.

As demonstrated in the video below (at 0:45), if the door is left ajar, your smartphone can audibly notify you of this, and an email alert is sent in case you don’t hear the alert.

If you’re wondering what to actually do with the contents of your fridge, why not check out this Arduino-controlled pizza oven? Something like that could probably use an IoT upgrade as well!