I inherited an old POS fridge this past weekend. The door seals are not great, but it makes cold air and was free, so I can't complain. I'm now using it as a fermentation chamber.
I didn't have any spare A419's laying around to control the temps, but I do have a linux server, a DS18S20, one of
these and various relays laying around. I hacked up the wiring and wrote a q&d script that gets fired up by a cron job. It works, but it's kludge. I ordered some 1-wire relays yesterday, but they take a while to show up (the free samples from maxim).
Since this is a fermentation chamber, and it's being controlled by hacked together spare parts, I've dubbed it "Fermilab".
My questions are:
- I poked around looking for process control software. I don't seem to find much, but from the rocket science chatter I see being bantered about here, I must presume that I've missed something. Certainly I'm not the first to fool around with 1-wire and brewing, and as I approach 50, I care less and less about writing the stuff myself. I'd much prefer to find some gpl project that does this already.
- The fridge is in questionable shape. The frame is bent - it's not "square". As such, the door doesn't hang straight and it doesn't really seal like it should. It's almost there, but not quite. I'm not sure if it's important being a fermentation chamber (allowing co2 to vent) or if I should strip the coils out of that fridge and build a new chamber out of foam board. However, I've never stripped coils from a fridge - I've seen a few pics around here, but it does give me the willies a bit.
Fermilab
Linear Mode
