When milk goes bad, you know it. Nothing ruins a morning faster than opening a carton only to unleash the awful smell of curdling milk. A new prototype milk jug, The Milkmaid, aims to save people from that situation.
The quart-sized milk container was created for a contest held by General Electric and Quirky, a website devoted to crowdsourcing for project developments. The challenge of the contest was to make everyday objects “smarter with software.”
The Milkmaid detects if milk is spoiled using pH sensors in a “smartbase” that the jugs sits on in the fridge. It also features a weight sensor that supposedly can tell how many cups of milk are left in the jug. The container features a temperature sensor that alerts users if the milk has been left out too long.
If the milk is bad, the Milkmiad sends a text message to an assigned cell phone. There’s also a free iPhone app that sends the information about the milk to the user’s phone. This includes the amount of milk left, the temperature, and the expected expiration date.
As mentioned above, The Milkmaid is only in prototype stage, but it does seem be to moving towards mass production. In the mean time, you can always rely on your sniffer.
