Jamie Bailey from Initial State, the Internet of Things (IoT) data solutions company, recently posted this how-to for creating a Beer/Wine Fridge of Awesomeness:

How do you take a perfectly good beer or wine fridge and make it awesome? A good start is to have your refrigerator tell you how many bottles are in it, when the door is open or closed, and the temperature inside your fridge. What is even better is to have that information available to you at all times on your laptop, tablet, and phone. You can know when your 17-year-old nephew steals your beer. You can know just how many beers you drank last month. You can know if you need to restock while you are walking down the store aisle.

Thanks to new, simple-to-use Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, anyone can transform their beer or wine fridge into the envy of the neighborhood in a matter of minutes.

I especially like this project’s inventiveness and use of a few different technologies. Along with the Raspberry Pi, door sensor, and temperature sensor, they’re using a Wii Balance Board to sense the weight of the refrigerator to get a count of the bottles inside. This tutorial is especially thorough and includes all the code, bill of materials, wiring diagrams, and a nice guide to connecting the Wii Balance Board to a Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth. So if you want to make your own version of this network-connected refrigerator, the trail is blazed.