A red wine bottling business in new Zealand got in touch with [Boz] to resolve a problem. They needed a method to immediately identify if a red wine bottle was filled or not. What he came up with is a extremely easy yet extremely efficient fill level sensor that can scan countless bottles an hour.
There were a few style decisions that went into the building of this red wine bottle sensor. [Boz] might have utilized a VGA video camera sensor, however provided the speed of the bottling line (half a meter per second), pushing all those pixels to a computer as well as doing real-time picture analysis would be difficult. [Boz] settled on a much easier service – a 1×128 linear CCD analog picture sensor. With a picture microcontroller, this enables the gadget to inspect several bottles per second, determine if the bottle is full or not (or overfilled), as well as send a ‘pass’ or ‘reject’ signal to the rest of the line.
The rest of the assembly is relatively simple with an LED backlight offering the illumination for the CCD as well as a Bluetooth transmitter for inspecting out the machine’s settings. On the bottling line, the gadget has 99% accuracy for both red wines in dark bottles as well as whites in eco-friendly bottles. You can take a gander of this gadget in action on a new Zealand bottling line below.