Cheese making

In parallel with the synthetic biology work, we are experimenting with cheeses made from powdered purified casein, and using vegan oils to replace milkfat. This page documents our cheese-making efforts.

Electric cheese cave

Most hard cheeses that are the least bit interesting need to be aged at colder than room temperature and high humidity. We've built a wifi-enabled cheese cave out of modified wine chiller.

The cheese cave is based around a "Haier 18-Bottle Thermal Electric Wine Tower" that we found for $40 on craigslist. This is an upright wine chiller that uses two large peltier modules with heatsinks and fans to chill the bottles.

Arduino and sensor

The temperature and humidity are read every second using a 3.3 volt Arduino Pro and a SHT15 sensor breakout board from Sparkfun.

The arduino is powered by 3.3v coming from the wifi router and communicates with the router using TTL serial.

The sensor communicates with the Arduino using 2-wire.

Wifi router

A Linksys/Cisco WRT160NL router was flashed with OpenWRT version 12.09 Attitude Adjustment. OpenWRT was configured to use an external usb flash drive as its root partition (extroot). Avahi was installed and the hostname set to cheese, such that any mDNS compatible operating systems are able to access the router through the domain name cheese.local.

A simple web server was written in lua to read the temperature and humidity from the Arduino and display it on a web page such that the status of the cheese cave can be monitored by accessing http://cheese.local in a web browser.

Physical modifications

The wine shelves were cut to make them flatter and a sushi mats was places on each shelf.

Wires were run into the chiller by un-mounting the bottom peltier module, cutting a small amount of insulation away, running the wire through and re-mounting the peltier module. One 110 vac power cord was run for the humidifier and a communications cord was run for the temperature/humidity sensor.

ToDo

• Allow changing humidity set-point from the web app
• Allow changing temperature set-point from the web app
• Write step-by-step guide for replicating the electric cheese cave

Wiring notes

Communications cables between sensor, router and arduino take place over old PS/2 cables that have been cut and soldered onto the different devices. These cables are shielded, easy to get for free, and the plugs make it easy to disconnect and reconnect components.

From router:

• RX: Brown
• TX: Orange
• 3.3v: Green
• GND: Ground (shield)