A Newly Developed Gas Bubble Counter using Raspberry Pi Controller for Fermentation Process

This research developed a gas bubble counter in which the Arduino mega 2560 controller was changied to the Raspberry Pi3 model B controller. A Photo sensor was also installed in order to provide highly accurate counts at high rate of the number of carbon dioxide gas bubbles generated from the fermentation process. This gas bubble counter can be set to the desired value of the number of gas bubbles to be counted. It can also record images of gas bubbles during the fermentation process by camera and has an alarm (buzzer) activated at the completion of work. The results showed that the error of counting increased with the increase of the rate of gas bubbles from 0% at gas bubble rate of 0-70 bubbles/minute; 0.1-0.25% at gas bubble rate of 70-100 bubbles/minute, 0.25-1.5% at gas bubble rate of 100-130 bubbles/minute and remained constant at 1.5% at gas bubble rate of 130-140 bubbles/minute. The gas bubble counter controlled by the Raspberry Pi3 model B controller provides higher accuracy of gas bubble count than the gas bubble counter controlled by the Arduino mega 2560 controller. In addition, the number of bubble counted by the gas bubble counter indicated that the rate of bubbles produced from the fermentation process corresponded to the growth rate of yeast.