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Comment by brettanomyces | Hacker News Reader

I'm adding flow meters to my keggerator so I can detect when someone pours themselves a beer from one of the taps.

The plan is to have a camera take a photo, do some facial recognition to see if its either one of my flatmates or myself, then optionally post the pic to #beertheif on twitter or start playing some music based on the chosen beer.

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My buddy has something going along the same lines but is using temp sensors to detect a pint being pulled:

https://mobile.twitter.com/toms_beer_keg/status/799323771043...

Two other non-contact methods I've seen are direct mass measurement (probably ebay the scales, it'll be like $500 new) or the most innovative thing I've seen is flow rate meters watching the CO2 source. See you can measure flow rate of the beer but that can get weird with bubble formation and sterilization but CO2 is clean and biologically boring and single phase. You can buy a flow rate meter with digital output for immense expense but its easier to use an analog one with a webcam. Big fun!

Measuring the co2 flow rate is an idea I hadn't considered! I only want to know when beer is being poured and not actually how much has been poured so measuring co2 may be a bit simpler for cleaning and actually wiring up too (although the wiring issue is specific to my setup)

That sounds really fun :) I've heard good things about the Swissflow flow meters, for monitoring beer flow to the tap, but they're _really_ expensive :(

Are you building your own flow meters? That's a fun project in magnets/magnetometers.

I've been looking at which flow meters to get but as deutronium says swissflow meters are quite expensive, however at the same time I don't really trust cheap meters to be in contact with my beer. Making them myself might be a good project!

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