On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Shrinivasan T <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Today, I had some interesting talk with some farmers.
>
> They produce groundnuts and face some issues when they sell.
>
> They could not measure the humidity in the nuts and
> this causes the merchants to say that "the nuts are wet".
>
> Dry nuts are the qualified one.
> People still measure the humidity by eating some nuts.
>
> :-)
>
> Is it possible to build a humidity sensors using any open source hardware
> like
> Aurdino / Breagle board and connect them to a PC to show the humidity
> of the nuts?
>

The complexity is in building a system that measures the humidity: collect
statistically valid samples,  weigh them , then grind , then heat them till
all liquid substances are evaporated, then weight them again, find the
difference in weight, make allowances for the volatile veg oil that also
evaporated.... you then have the qty of water that was there in the sample.
And build a system that will automate the above listed steps!! Unless there
are some gauges that can output digital signals proportional to the humidity
when a sample is placed inside/on it!!

Compared to the challenges above, using open source / propreitary / any
board to interface with a linux/openbsd/solaris/whatever to produce human
digestible data is too insignificant a problem to worry about in the
beginning.

Basically, the problem is too complex to proceed on the basis that I have
this XYZ tool, how do I use this tool to solve this problem. Rather the
approach should be what tools I need to solve this problem?

regds,
mano
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