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Electronic nose to detect fruit ripening

Can we get fruit trees to report to us when their fruit is ripe?

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Our organization (Concrete Jungle) picks fruit from urban fruit trees around the Atlanta area. One problem that we face is that as we grow, it becomes harder and harder for us to keep track of our trees -- they all produce on slightly different schedules (or not at all) and we need to know what each is doing before we can plan a fruit-picking event.

We've teamed up with Carl DiSalvo's Public Design Workshop at Georgia Tech to try to create an electronic nose that can smell fruit ripening in a tree. This way the tree could let us know when it's ready to be picked. We're trying to work with cheap Taguchi gas sensors as you might find on Sparkfun. Although these sensors are sold as a propane/alcohol/... sensor, they are not particularly specific to those gases. We're hoping that by using an array of these sensors we'll be able to tease out a meaningful signal.

So what makes us think that we can even do what we want to with this project? A few points of consideration:

  • We don't really know what we're looking for. We're hoping to get some type of signal and then back-correlate it with fruit ripeness. And ripening is a complex process: we know that ethylene is the main gas released by many fruits as they ripen, but there are likely many other gases released as well. For example, Hirano et al used sensors similar to ours to monitor popcorn cooking and waffle cooking:
  • Our sensors are cheap. Taguchi gas sensors are like $1.50 shipped from China. Typically the cheaper your sensor is, the less specific it is.
  • Taguchi sensors generally work the same way: oxygen from the air adsorbs on to the surface of a tin dioxide semiconductor and causes its resistance to increase. When the heated sensor comes in contact with a combustible gas, the gas and the oxygen react, removing the oxygen from the sensor surface and decreasing the sensor's resistance. It might say it's an alcohol sensor, but by its nature it can't help but sense other combustible gases (which should cover most hydrocarbons).
  • Even if ethylene were our only gas of interest, it's really similar to ethane, which in turn is really similar to methane and propane.

Despite how prevalent the Taguchi gas sensors are, there's actually a lot that goes in to getting good data from them and you don't see many projects covering those details.

So what you'll find here is less of hardware hacking and more process hacking: how to move beyond a basic breathalyzer or air quality project and start to get good data from these sensors.

multi-series.html

A basic graphing function in D3.js. There are many paths in here to change: the path to D3.js, the path too the csv log file, and the path to a notes file, which is a CSV file in format of "time,note", such as: 20:21:12 11 8 2016,end 48 hour burn-in 17:28:54 12 8 2016,mystery power outage D3 will overlay a dashed vertical line accompanied by the note text for each time where we have a note. One may also adjust the width/height of the overall image.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) - 4.58 kB - 03/24/2017 at 15:07

Download

csver

This is a basic shell script that accepts a single argument (your logged serial session) and converts it to CSV. I like to have logs stored in a format that is produced by the sketch (since it contains all the information), and then convert to CSV only when necessary for further operations.

csver - 428.00 bytes - 03/24/2017 at 15:05

Download

sketch.ino

The sketch running on the Arduino Nano for polling the 8 sensors. This sketch prints something like: 0:11:48 15 1 2017: A0: 159, A1: 204, A2: 193, A3: 346, A4: 365, A5: 336, A6: 179, A7: 194, Temp: 21.88, DBTemp: 22.00 every 30 seconds. To keep a log of this output, I'll make a serial connection to the Nano and keep a log of that via `screen -L /dev/ttyUSB0` or something similar.

ino - 3.44 kB - 03/24/2017 at 15:02

Download

  • Slow progress

    Craig03/10/2017 at 22:56 0 comments

    Following up from our pear experiment

    Well unfortunately I was not able to get much of a signal out of measuring a pear. That's a shame because it's one of the fruits we try to harvest in large amounts.

    Once I had the chamber somewhat better sealed, this is the best data I was able to get... about 5 days worth. Unfortunately, there's not much of a clear signal here. Stuff is increasing, but it's also got a lot of wander to it and would be hard to determine a GO/NO-GO threshold from this.

    There were still sealing issues: a lot of those large spikes appeared when I sat down at my computer next to the sample chamber and this was super frustrating cause I thought I sealed it really damn well.

    Two holes, both with o-rings. All the existing holes were covered with the nice aluminum-foil sealing tape that conforms really well. I don't know what else I have to do here... I can sit down and watch the signals slowly start to climb. Very frustrating.

    Of the data I got, if we take our strongest signal (A1 -- MQ3 alcohol sensor) and plot it in relation to temperature, we can see a pretty strong relationship:

    You can see that there are several periods where the data decrease in a linear fashion and then increase in an almost identical fashion. It's sort of like someone is writing the letter 'm' over and over.

    Furthermore, these linear relationships all have about the same slope, and I'm saying that's our temperature compensation coefficient:

    These lines all have a slope between 0.125-0.154. The value I ended up using was 0.1313, but it probably doesn't matter that much.

    I'm really trying not to imagine things in the data here. I'm restricting myself to the areas where the sensors decrease and increase along the same linear path because those don't make physical sense with sensing a gas emitted by a fruit but they do make physical sense when considering an oscillating temperature relationship.

    Taking our 0.131-ish slope and compensating, we get:

    This graph has the original data (blue), the measured temperature (green, and multiplied by 5 to increase its contrast on the graph scale), and the corrected data (orange). Overall it did a decent job of taking a wobbly signal and making it pretty straight. We do have a signal hidden in there, but it's just not very strong.

    One other thing to note: when I ended this experiment, I took the pear out and tried eating it. It was TOTALLY GROSS. It had absorbed whatever rubber chemicals had volatilized from my big 10-conductor cable and just tasted like sweet weird rubber. It was super disgusting and I couldn't take more than 2 bites and I regret swallowing them. So there's something to be said for a new setup entirely that doesn't use that cable.

    Next steps

    A bit dejected after this one honestly. My thoughts at this point are to get as much wireless as I can so I can completely self-contain the electronics. Benefits of this:

    • No holes need to be cut in the container so we can certain that we're sealing really well
    • Can get rid of smelly cables
    • Can switch to digital potentiometers for sensor calibration, leading to much more repeatability

    Disadavantages:

    • Have to make a new circuit board with those potentiometers and mounting for some kind of wifi-enabled microprocessor (ESP32 for instance)
    • Have to figure out how to program the ESP32 and deal with level shifting 5V sensor outputs to 3.3V analog inputs and deal with its immature toolchain in general.
    • Have to figure out how to supply ~1.5A wirelessly. I really don't have enough EE knowledge to be able to do this yet. Qi chargers/general inductive charges seem to top out in the 500-1000mA area. I guess I could get 3 and put them in parallel?

  • Sealing up the chamber even more...

    Craig02/17/2017 at 17:10 0 comments

    Smelling a pear. This will be running for a week+ probably since pears are sold so under-ripe.

    These gas sensors are just crazy sensitive to any airflows! With the previous setup, I would notice sensor values slowly begin to take off whenever I sat down at my computer next to the chamber and stay there.

    Since these sensors are measuring the gas by depleting it, those elevated sensor readings meant some external gas was continuously entering the chamber somehow.

    So my goal now is to eliminate as many holes as possible in to the chamber. I got an Adafruit inductive charger kit so that I can wirelessly power the fan inside of the chamber, and I also whipped up a small adapter PCB to route all of the sensor connections in to one cable. This way instead of having to cut 8 holes in to the chamber lid for the sensors, I can instead cut one hole and mount an o-ring sealed cord-grip in it:

    This particular cable is definitely overkill for this situation, but it was the only one I could find that I could buy by the foot instead of by the spool. McMaster FTW (as usual).

  • New setup is coming along...

    Craig01/19/2017 at 19:57 0 comments

    Still working on some issues, but things are getting better:

    * New, better-sealed sample chamber:

    * New, better-sealed and less-noisy data on a new real-time 5" display

    * Adafruit Power Boost 1000 upstream of the Raspberry Pi. This seems to be an actual pass-through USB power source...I had been getting so many elusive and random power outages that would kill the Pi, corrupt its SD card and forced me to reinstall everything, so this is hopefully a little insurance against that.

  • Getting somewhere (October/November)

    Craig12/13/2016 at 04:01 1 comment

    Last time we left off with kind of a one step forward, two steps backward situation: I found that Tyvek is too gas-permeable to be a good sensor chamber material, that our sensors are quite temperature sensitive, and that store-bought apples don't really have much to report to these sensors.

    That last part's not too big a deal. If we're buying an apple in a store then we know it's already ripe and ready to eat. That's not relevant to our goals. Apples were an easy fruit to test out as fruit season wound down here in Atlanta and there's less to choose from on the trees.

    But I did start getting real, clean data. So now we can move on to fruit that we care about, which is also conveniently our last real option for the season: the native persimmon.

    Persimmons

    These are persimmons picked from this tree on October 26th and aside from the 2 small orange ones, it is a group of solidly unripe persimmons. We should hopefully get a good transition out of these.

    Fun facts about persimmons: they taste like orange jello when ripe and they can form a bezoar in your belly if you eat too many unripe ones. PLUS double fun fact: you can drink a lot of Coke and its acid will dissolve the bezoar!

    New Sensor Setup

    I've got a new sample chamber setup for this iteration too:

    I waterjet cut some holes in the lid to mount the sensor electronics outside of the chamber. I also have an extra hole in there for mounting a temperature sensor and a miscellaneous hole for doing power pass-through for a fan or whatever else. I'd love to find a small usb bulkhead fitting but this will do for now.

    This new setup is great because:

    • It keeps sensor electronics outside of the chamber and away from any condensation
    • It mounts the sensors at the highest/hottest point so they should be more temperature stable
    • It exposes the sensor trimpots so I can make adjustments without having to open the chamber.
    • It's a little more repeatable since I can just screw the lid on and not crimp on a piece of aluminum foil every time I open the chamber.

    Fully assembled with DS18B20 temperature sensor:

    Sensor Trimpots

    Before I get in to the persimmons, a note about the trimpots in parallel with each sensor: I don't really know what I'm doing with these yet. They form a voltage divider with the sensor and act as a way of calibrating the sensor or adjusting its sensitivity. Because I don't know exactly what I'm doing yet, I try to calibrate them to all to roughly same value in a chamber of precision reference air, which is the air in my house.

    For reasons that I assume to be related to manufacturing, not all sensors respond the same way to trimpot adjustment, so it's mostly a matter of finding a low-medium shared value that I can reach with each of the sensors. That value is about 145 (out of 1024) with this particular array of sensors.

    Ideally the trimpots would be replaced with digital potentiometers so that you could do software-based calibration, as it's pretty tedious to tune each trimpot with your tiny screwdriver. It also seems like the manual trimpots introduce another source of error and having digital potentiometers would allow for more repeatable experiments.

    Smelling the Persimmons

    The sensors had been off for a bit and I wanted to give them another burn-out to get readjusted. They began to drift during this time so I after a few days tuned them down to around 145, waited 5 minutes, and threw some persimmons in:

    We have some cool data here! The sensors detected the persimmons instantly and you can see them really start to ripen around halfway through Thursday the 27th. Shortly after, there was a power outage that coincided with my being out of town. It should be noted that the power outage was likely a small blip that was only long enough to knock out the Raspberry Pi. The sensors were warm when I returned home and Atlanta had been in a 3 month drought at that point so it's unlikely it was an extended outage.

    Since the container seemed well sealed and since the sensors were warm, I started logging again...

    Read more »

  • Finally smelling frui^UFinding more problems (September/October)

    Craig12/09/2016 at 06:19 0 comments

    Okay, enough faffing about with getting our sensors stable. Let's see if we can smell something! And heads-up, since this is my first real experiment, it's full of false starts.

    I took a pear picked from this tree over Labor Day weekend and stuck in our sample chamber. It was quite unripe because it lasted in there for over a month. Since the sensors give off a fair amount of heat and the chamber was sealed with aluminum foil, lots of condensation built up on the chamber walls.

    And not a lot smelliness to report:

    To deal with condensation and to promote gas mixing within the chamber, I swapped out the aluminum foil for a Tyvek cover to allow water vapor to pass. I also threw in a USB fan:

    At this point, I had to go out of town for several weeks and didn't want to leave the sensors running unattended, so I had to end the experiment here. When I came back, I could press my nose up to the Tyvek and smell over-ripe pear through the material, so it seemed like it was about as effective as having nothing on there at all.

    XXX figure out way to sense fruit on a tree without having lots of condensation and heat influence

    Unfortunately, these experiments were taking place right as fruit season was ending in Atlanta, so we didn't have a lot of options from which to choose. My only option at the time was a store-bought apple. I threw it in and returned to the aluminum foil covering along with the fan:

    Well this is weird. The apple hung out in there for almost a week exactly and oscillated (with 24-hour period) around the same average the whole time. It emerged from the sample chamber soft and mealy. Thoughts:
    • Bad fruit choice. Store apples are basically ripe already and aren't going to change much unless you let it hang out for quite a while. Presumably whatever ethylene or other ripening gases produced by the apple are consumed by the sensor, so this sample chamber may actually slow the ripening process compared to an apple in any other sealed container.
    • There is a big temperature effect on sensing! This experiment was run in mid-October, which is the height of leave-your-windows-open season in Atlanta. Also all the times are reported in UTC, so peak temperature seemed to be around 6 pm and lowest temperature was around 9:30-10 am. Apparently if we're going to sense a fruit on a tree we're going to have to do some real temperature compensation.

    Until I could get a temperature sensor in place, I tried experimenting with the Atmega internal temperature sensor. This seemed like it would have a decent chance of working because our sensing setup is at equilibrium, so even though we're measuring die temperature it should track ambient temperature pretty well. And it did end up doing that, but seemed a little too narrow-ranged and coarse to rely upon:

    XXX figure out how we're going to compensate for temperature in an actual tree-based sensor.

  • Version 2: real sensor setup! (August/Sept 2016)

    Craig10/31/2016 at 04:36 0 comments

    Version 2 is a major upgrade for our project. We connected with Michael at maskau.dk and started to learn some real things about working with these gas sensors. Michael's page on electronic noses is fascinating, and he's able to get some incredibly impressive, clean data from his setup. Data like this:

    Michael has built some really cool custom PCBs and sensing chambers for his gas sensor setup, and we were able to obtain two 8-sensor arrays for our experimental use:

    The 8-sensor array consists of two boards: 1 PCB with just 8 gas sensor sockets and a separate board with a dedicated power connection, potentiometers for each sensor and headers for plugging in an Arduino nano. It's pretty perfect. No wiring or soldering to be done, and you just need to write an Arduino sketch to read A0-A7 at your desired interval.

    Our goal is to get clean, repeatable data. The first step in doing that is getting the sensors to settle down. There's a 48-hour minimum bake-out period to work out whatever crap is left on the sensors from the factory. You just energize the sensors and let them run for 2 days. Here's our bake-out setup:

    The setup is two arrays of 8-sensor setups. Pink and yellow cables in the photos are connected to Samsung 2A USB (5V) chargers and those are powering the whole sensor setup. The gray and red cables are connected to a Raspberry Pi that logs the data. The Arduino Nano on each sensor setup is simply printing the sensor outputs to the serial port every 30 seconds:

    20:21:36 9 8 2016: A0: 488, A1: 544, A2: 481, A3: 348, A4: 342, A5: 346, A6: 357, A7: 349
    The Raspberry Pi logs this data just by connecting to the serial port and saving the output. Something like:
    screen -L /dev/ttyS0

    Results from burn-out of one of the arrays is below:

    Burn-in seemed to progress somewhat as expected. The sensors drift a fair amount at first, settle down, and then I tuned them all to the same baseline using the potentiometers. They then start to creep away from each other, but as I later learned, this was not an ideal setup for doing burn-in, so that's okay.

    Additionally, compared to Michael's data, each sensor is quite noisy. To reduce the noise, I tried a bunch of different things:

    • Moving the Raspberry Pi to a USB battery to see if its power draw was affecting the circuit (it did not)
    • Moving the sensor array to battery power to test a different power supply (different but still bad).
    • Moving a sensor array to a benchtop CV/CC supply to test another power supply (not that different).
    • Reading 1 sample every second and printing the average of it every 30 seconds rather than reading one sample every 30 seconds (not much different).
    • Removing 7 sensors from an array to see if they were causing noise in each other (slightly better).
    • Switching to a dedicated 5V, 12A supply (LS75-5, $25 from Mouser)

    The dedicated LS75-5 had a tremendous effect on sensor noise and cleared things up immediately. That, and capping the jar/sensor chamber with tight-fitting aluminum foil really helped stabilize the sensors:

    Up next...testing actual fruit!

  • Version 1.5 (July 2016)

    Craig10/31/2016 at 03:25 0 comments


    Version 1.5

    Moving on from version 1, I wanted to try to address the noise issue and add sensor sensitivity adjustment. Having all the sensors be in the MicroSD shield prototyping space was not really fun to work with either.

    So version 1.5 was trying to move our gas sensors over to the Seeedstudio Grove system for doing environmental monitoring. Everything gets a four-pin connector, and you can buy gas sensors with Grove connectors and potentiometers already on them. It sounds perfect if it works. (Spoiler alert: it doesn't)

    The biggest problem you face with trying to run lots these gas sensors in an Arduino environment is that each sensor draws about 150mA. Trying to run 8 of them means you're drawing about 1.2A at 5V, or using 6W of power. Arduinos are just not built for that. If you're powering the Arduino with something greater than 5V, its onboard regulator (NCP1117ST50T3G) is rated for 1A max, and will likely run very hot for currents that are a significant fraction of that.

    But we also live in an age of ubiquitous, cheap, high-power 5V USB power supplies, so you could potentially power the sensors over USB and bypass the regulator. This is the route I chose, but it has its own wrinkle: the Arduino UNO has a PTC resettable fuse that can sustain 500mA and will definitely trip at 1A, but has kind of undefined behavior between 500mA and 1A.

    My solution here was to split the sensors up between two Arduinos so that each would need only 600mA per Arduino. I then soldered an additional PTC atop the existing PTC so that we'd have 2 500mA fuses in parallel, which seems like it'd give 1A of current flow.

    With this in place, I wrote some code to let the Arduinos establish a client-host relationship over I2C so that the client sensor values could be saved on the host's SD card. I also added an I2C display so I could monitor the sensor values, and then threw all the sensors in a sealed bag to see what they'd do.

    Not bad. Seeedstudio also had some extra sensors that Sparkfun didn't, so I was able to add in a formaldehyde sensor, air quality sensor and CO2 sensor. I was having trouble getting much of a reading out of the MQ2 and MQ3 sensors, but things were generally working and I could start trying to calibrate things. Unfortunately, things couldn't even get to the point of testing.

    When setting up this system I noticed that a certain sensor would short out the Arduino every time I plugged it in. This would happen even if I removed the actual gas sensor from the socket, so it was a problem in the breakout board circuitry itself. There’s not much to that circuitry except for a few capacitors, an inductor and an IC. That IC (only labeled in the EAGLE part info) is an ETA1036 step-up voltage converter. The datasheet is super short but it makes one thing clear: max input voltage of 4.5V. This means don’t recommend people connect 5V to it on your wiki.

    During the course of figuring this out I managed to cause another sensor to short out the Arduino, and it seemed like a matter of time before all the sensors would fail.

    Maybe I'm misunderstanding something with these sensors, but this is the point where I gave up on these sensors and moved on to version 2...

  • Version 1: noisy but functional (Dec 2015/Jan 2016)

    Craig10/31/2016 at 02:29 4 comments

    We at Concrete Jungle and Georgia Tech have been working on this project for a while, but are only now making a Hackaday project around it, so I'll catch you up on what we've done so far.

    Version 1

    This version was an Arduino Uno, Sparkfun SD shield, and 5 gas sensors (methane, LPG, carbon monoxide, alcohol, and hydrogen). Each gas sensor was connected to the Arduino using a Sparkfun gas sensor breakout according to the instructions given at Wiring:

    This is not a good way to work with these sensors. Put a potentiometer in place of the 10k resistor and you can adjust its sensitivity.

    I unfortunately don't have good close-up photos of the original setup, but it is visible below:

    This setup had a variety of problems and I don't recommend others repeat it except for the most basic sensing projects.

    First, I wanted to establish a baseline. If you put each sensor in a separate closed plastic bags, would they settle to a reasonable value? For the most part, yes:

    Things to notice:

    • Alcohol sensing is probably broken in some way.
    • The lines are generally flat. This is good since we just have air in the bag.
    • Calibration could be a lot better. Methane hangs out in the 800’s the whole time and our maximum possible reading is 1023. This is probably a limitation of having just a 10k resistor in place of a tuneable potentiometer.
    • There’s noise that gets worse across sensors. The sensors are connected to the Arduino in the order of CO (on analog input 0), H2 (on analog input 1), LPG (etc), alcohol and CH4, and our data get noisy in almost that exact order.
    • Our sensors influence each other. There are many peaks and valleys in the data that overlap exactly across sensors. That does not seem likely given that each sensor is in its own separate, mostly-sealed environment.

    But overall not terrible! How about on a real piece of fruit?

    First Experiment

    We put all the sensors in a sealed plastic bag with a green banana. Bananas don’t grow in Atlanta but they are really smelly when ripe. If our sensor system can’t detect a banana ripening then it seems like it wouldn’t stand a chance for an apple or pear.

    The sensors were all placed in the bag and left running for a day so they could burn-in and be stable. After that, the banana was placed in the bag and the bag was sealed, leaving about 1” unsealed to accommodate the sensor wiring. Our experiment took place over the course of 10 days and we had some reference bananas from the same bunch to compare visually during the experiment and to taste afterwards.

    The first nice thing to notice about the data is that it points up and to the right. That’s super cool! We’re detecting something in relation to ripeness. But beyond that, we’ve got our usual problems.

    Also, the banana ripened really weirdly in the bag and gave off a lot of moisture. It tasted fine in the end, but we probably need to use a water vapor-permeable material like Tyvek in the real world. The last photo in this GIF shows the bag-ripened version on the bottom compared to a banana from the same bunch, but ripened in open air.

    Since Taguchi gas sensors rely on a heated semiconductor to operate, they increase the ambient temperature and could accelerate ripening. We'll have to take this in to account in future designs.

    Second Experiment

    Once again we have a trend and once again there’s also a lot of garbage. There is a noisy period there from Sunday the 6th to Wednesday the 9th where I squeezed the bag and tried to distribute the gas around. One can imagine that if I hadn’t done that then there would be a much smoother curve there.

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ghdcsbj7854 wrote 01/16/2021 at 06:03 point

what a wonderful article that you shared this projects is looking like an osam piece of art i am very glad to see that i am also working on the same project you can see here https://fragrancesea.com/versace-mens-colognes/

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Tburkeulosis wrote 05/14/2019 at 11:44 point

Hi, I am trying to complete a project for college using a similar set up but for VOCs from soils using Arduino and MG sensors, I was wondering if you could send me on your code as I cannot seem to get the download working or any more schematic diagrams thank you.  Also loving the project, pm me and thank you.

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Julius wrote 04/13/2019 at 07:46 point

Hi, how's the progress on your project? Can i have some of your ideas or sources for constructing the project? Our project is related in yours. It's just our proj. Is specified for coffee berry. TIA 😄

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cloudsrule9 wrote 04/03/2019 at 07:38 point

Any chance you could upload (or PM) some of the raw data. The Banana stuff looks like what I'm after. Long story but I'm looking for some data from these types of sensors to test a fourier transform analysis idea have. Basically i think you need to look at the frequency domain rather than the time one.

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g.woodford wrote 03/29/2019 at 21:27 point

Hi you might like to read the attached reference which mentions  fruit ripening/ethyl butyrate emission and detection with an array of different types of gas sensors. Sorry I have no hands on experience tio help! ... Geoff

Low-cost Gas Chromatography with Gas Sensor Array
for Rapid Tests in Food Industry Processes
Marie-Luise Bauersfeld, Carolin Peter, Jürgen
Wöllenstein
Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques
IPM
Freiburg, Germany
marie-luise.bauersfeld@ipm.fraunhofer.de


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colella.r wrote 03/20/2019 at 14:54 point

Hi,

I am searching for Michael Madsen's stuff (PCB layout etc...) but his site is offline. Would you please share some files? Thanks!

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Craig wrote 03/28/2019 at 21:48 point

Hey there -- unfortunately, I only really have some photos and renderings of stuff, but no schematics. Is that useful to you?

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colella.r wrote 03/29/2019 at 10:25 point

yes, I will try to reverse engineer... :)

Would you please send me them in a pm? Thank you!

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Untitled wrote 07/20/2017 at 22:06 point

1) Your chamber is going to outgas (likely it's made of polyethylene or polypropylene).  Things the hydrocarbon sensors will pickup.  Not sure about the other sensors.  I suggest using a glass jar.

2) It seems like you're recording temperature.  What about humidity?  That's going to effect your sensors.  We calibrate our hydrocarbon sensors at work for humidity and temperature.

3) Air flow may impact some of these sensors.  If you're relying on gas-exchange temp, etc. will be even more confounding.  I suggest building a "closed-loop" setup where you can sample air, run it in a loop and measure the contents until your sensors stabilize, then expel the air and repeat.  A few pumps, etc. are needed but I think you'll find this necessary.  And you'll want your temp/humidity sensors inside that loop.  

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Jan wrote 02/17/2017 at 17:21 point

Amazing project. Really like the idea. Following! :)

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veshtov wrote 12/08/2016 at 20:31 point

You may want to e-mail some scientists at Washington State University, They have different programs about farm management and their research center in Puyallup, Washington might have some scientists available to give you more concrete fruit ripening numbers for your sensors as these are the types of things they would be looking at. https://puyallup.wsu.edu/

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Craig wrote 12/09/2016 at 04:44 point

Good call! I'll get in touch. Thanks!

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