u/Chrono_Constant3

Edit: Alright nerds, due to popular demand, I made a GitHub repo as quickly as I could. Feel free to have a look and build the thing if you'd like to, and feel free to send me any critiques or changes you think should be made. I don't know what I'm doing so I'm very open to suggestions. The files and info can be found at https://github.com/ChronoConstant/Sourdough-Monitor. Have fun.

I like making things and I’m enjoying getting started with sourdough so when I started my starter this idea popped into my head and I decided to build it for fun.

At its core it’s really just an ESP32-c3 that uses a time of flight sensor to measure the distance from the lid to the top of the starter and uses that value to calculate how much the starter has risen. It sends and logs that data via MQTT to my Home Assistant dashboard which I have hung on the wall in my kitchen next to my stove. It also logs temperature and humidity as well as the time since the starter was last fed. I can trigger a feed from either the button on top or from the button on the dashboard and that tells the device to reset the rise percentage and log a new baseline height for the starter. Battery life is still up in the air but it’s looking like probably at least a month between charges so that works for me. The lid itself is just something I whipped up in Fusion and printed out. Not the most aesthetically pleasing but it’s functional.

The plan going forward is to begin logging the data in a more robust accessible database so I can use it to create some predictive algorithms for rise times in different temperatures and humidity.

It’s overkill but I’m enjoying the pretty graph and it scratches a little itch in my brain so I’m happy with the results.

Just to be clear I’m not selling anything. I built most of the code for the firmware with AI and just made adjustments where it was necessary. This is just a personal project I wanted to show off. I’d love to hear any critiques or ideas on how to improve it.

A few days ago I made a post asking for some advice with my young starter and got some really good advice so thank you r/sourdoughstarter for the help. In that post I posted a screenshot of a sourdough monitoring dashboard and there was some interest in what I built so I figured I’d post what I built.

At its core it’s really just an ESP32-c3 that uses a time of flight sensor to measure the distance from the lid to the top of the starter and uses that value to calculate how much the starter has risen. It sends and logs that data via MQTT to my Home Assistant dashboard which I have hung on the wall in my kitchen next to my stove. It also logs temperature and humidity as well as the time since the starter was last fed. I can trigger a feed from either the button on top or from the button on the dashboard and that tells the device to reset the rise percentage and log a new baseline height for the starter. Battery life is still up in the air but it’s looking like probably at least a month between charges so that works for me.

The plan going forward is to begin logging the data in a more robust accessible database so I can use it to create some predictive algorithms for rise times in different temperatures and humidity.

It’s overkill but I’m enjoying the pretty graph and it scratches a little itch in my brain so I’m happy with the results.

Just to be clear I’m not selling anything. I built most of the code for the firmware with AI. This is just a personal project I wanted to show off.

Hello starter parents, I have a question about my young starter I was hoping to get some clarification on. I just started my starter 2 weeks ago, and it's been through some extremely active periods and some less active periods. I was feeding it twice a day at a little over a 1:1:1 ratio, but people on the internet seemed to think 1:2:2 once a day was fine. So I switched to that schedule, and activity slowed. The time to peak was somewhere around 20 hours. As of last night, that has shifted to a more respectable 12 hours, with doubling occurring within 7 hours. I built a little ESP32 sourdough monitor that displays starter info on my Home Assistant dashboard because I'm a nerd and I like data. As you can see in the screen grab I posted, it's currently right at the top right now, and my instinct is to feed it right now. So the question is this, in this young stage where I'm trying to establish a strong, consistent starter, should I be feeding right at peak if I can, or should I give it the full 24 hours before feeding and just go for consistency?