Homemade Monitoring

Ideal wine storage is just about 13C (54- 56F). How do you make sure that your cellar is always this temperature? Well, that may take a little more than monitoring, but remote monitoring in a nice feature to have in your wine cellar.

Homemade Wine Cellar Monitor using OWFS

If you are a hardware hacker and like to tinker around with electronics
like I do, then this may be of interest to you.

The setup uses the OWFS program – an easy way to use the powerful 1-wire system of Dallas/Maxim. This is a simple and flexible program for monitoring and controlling the physical environment. You can write scripts to read temperature, display information on an LCD, log and graph.

Learn more about OWFS here.

Once I finally get things in order, and have a functioning wine cellar, you can bet I will try this out. It seems like a truly easy way to monitor without the expensive equipment. Furthermore, you should be able to automate temperature control systems with this.

One thought I always keep in mind though, and it sounds so cliché, is that good wine is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. I try not to let technology make me lazy. These fancy devices weren’t around for our ancestors to use, and they controlled their environments just fine.