Sourd.io is a Fitness Tracker for your Sourdough Starter

April 16, 2020
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sourdio-social-bread-data-tracker
A sourdough starter monitor with a cute face next to a bowl and a small cup of flour

Making bread is suddenly popular, and so are my stupid-until-recently bread hacks.

For years, I have designed ridiculous ways to monitor my sourdough starters. Now, for the first time ever, people are interested in my solutions.

Tweet from Olga Khazan: Please, God, someone do a sport so my boyfriend will stop talking about his sourdough starter

Enter the IoT Sourdough Starter Monitor, which monitors your bread’s temperature, humidity, and rise, so you know how it’s growing and when it needs to be fed. Let’s call it… sourd.io

A sourdough starter monitor with a cute face next to a bowl and a small cup of flour

A babysitter for my sourdough starter, Brad the Bread.

Sourd.io screws onto the top of a ball jar for versatility and millennial comfort vibes. You can also balance it on two skewers to judge the rise of bread in a bowl, outside your jar.

The underside of the sourd.io sourdough starter monitor, which has a temperature/humidity sensor and an ultrasonic distance sensor

Sourd.io features a temperature and humidity sensor as well as a distance sensor

Sourd.io lets you see data correlated with your sourdough starter’s rise. I found that the growth curves were most clearly visible in the humidity produced by the rising starter.

A timelapse of bread rising inside the sourd.io jar
 

If you’re a developer and you want to build one yourself, try this How-To post complete with code, libraries, enclosure, and instructions for adding your own MQTT broker. Also, if you’re a VC, please invest in my fake sourdough bread monitor company.

A screenshot of a startup-looking website for sourd.io

This is a real fake site I made, because startups. Go there to see many jargons but real facts about connectivity.

Questions on the build? Feel free to leave comments and issues on the Github repo, find me on Twitter, or check out Twilio on Twitch, where I will inevitably stream a sourd.io build.

Questions about Twilio? Sign up for an account to build one yourself, or talk to Sales about IoT connectivity solutions.

Christine Sunu is the Internet of Things Developer Community Engagement Manager at Twilio. She's currently working on IoT, ambient computing, and robots that pretend to be alive. Find Christine on Twitter (@christinesunu) or Github (cmsunu28)