Brew Beer with the BeagleBone Black

Pretty cool. I know alot of people were real psyched when raspberry pi came out. This looks like a good competitor.

I pulled the trigger on one as the in panel front end for my BCS-460

When thy do a port of 4.x android it's so going on.(gets have my beersmith) Until then, they have chrome as a native app.

Up and running gents.

Looking good. Actually I was under the impression that you could run a current release of Android on it with no mods. Maybe that's a different BeagleBone.

Evidently that's true for the other two boards.

TI hasn't put a distro for the black together yet. Hopefully by the end of the month.

Got myself a BeagleBone. For some reason I can't immediately fathom I went for the original (white) one.

It's pretty cool though. I'm going to use it for a home automation system.

Don't have ethernet in my garage so I'm going to hack a wireless router for the internet connection to that, if I ever get that far.

Not to be negative, but the author did a pretty bad job. We all know people who use the RPI for this instance.

Not to be negative?!

I don't think it was intended as a full featured system, it's clearly thrown together on a breadboard as a demo.

Nor is your comparison fair, because (for example) TeensyPi and BrewPi both piggyback an Arduino (or similar) on top of the RPi because of its limited I/O capabilities. This demo uses BBB on its own.

alien said:

Not to be negative?!

I don't think it was intended as a full featured system, it's clearly thrown together on a breadboard as a demo.

Nor is your comparison fair, because (for example) TeensyPi and BrewPi both piggyback an Arduino (or similar) on top of the RPi because of its limited I/O capabilities. This demo uses BBB on its own.

Click to expand...

Well played sir, well played. I didnt realize that they where piggybacking an Arduino.

alien said:

Not to be negative?!

I don't think it was intended as a full featured system, it's clearly thrown together on a breadboard as a demo.

Nor is your comparison fair, because (for example) TeensyPi and BrewPi both piggyback an Arduino (or similar) on top of the RPi because of its limited I/O capabilities. This demo uses BBB on its own.

Click to expand...

I've never understood this concern regarding limited I/O on the Pi for brewing purposes. For what's being shown in this demo, no Arduino is necessary to make a Pi do the same thing. I run my entire hotside brewery on a standalone Pi using 3 pins total (1wire, HLT SSR, BK SSR). For dual-stage fermentation control you'd use the same number of pins, and for single-stage fermentation you'd only need 2. Where's the I/O limitation come into play?

BBB is certainly a great board as well, fwiw.

cadwallion said:

I've never understood this concern regarding limited I/O on the Pi for brewing purposes. For what's being shown in this demo, no Arduino is necessary to make a Pi do the same thing. I run my entire hotside brewery on a standalone Pi using 3 pins total (1wire, HLT SSR, BK SSR). For dual-stage fermentation control you'd use the same number of pins, and for single-stage fermentation you'd only need 2. Where's the I/O limitation come into play?

Click to expand...

I'm not dissing the Pi at all. Well perhaps only slightly because I couldn't get my hands on one last year and you are right you can do plenty of stuff with just a few pins. Brewing does not need very fast I/O and if you did want extra pins to drive valves or pumps or something, the I2C bus (2 pins) plus a 16 bit expander chip will provide all the connectivity you could possibly need.

If you want analogue inputs for any reason you need an external ADC which would be a total pain. But that's not a deal breaker by any means.

cadwallion said:

I've never understood this concern regarding limited I/O on the Pi for brewing purposes. For what's being shown in this demo, no Arduino is necessary to make a Pi do the same thing. I run my entire hotside brewery on a standalone Pi using 3 pins total (1wire, HLT SSR, BK SSR). For dual-stage fermentation control you'd use the same number of pins, and for single-stage fermentation you'd only need 2. Where's the I/O limitation come into play?

BBB is certainly a great board as well, fwiw.

Click to expand...

The reason BrewPi uses Arduino as far as i know is because it ALWAYS runs.

This as well as a RaspPi are still PC's at their core that can lock up or crash in some fashion. What happens when your RaspPi crashes over the weekend on your fermentation fridge? Best case it stops doing whatever its doing, worse case it heats your chamber up until you catch it or freezes your beer.

Microcontrollers on the other hand dont suffer this problem as much because they just run through a set sequence, if they do somehow lock up(which is extremely rare if the code is done properly) its easy to remotely restart them and it just automatically starts back up again like nothing ever happened.

RaspPi's are notorious for crashing, while Arduino's arent powerful enough to host the complex web server BrewPi uses...which is why they use both...to get the best of both worlds..the processing power of the RPI and the always on reliability of the Arduino.

That said this is a very cool project and idea to handle ferm control for those without room for a fridge. Im curious how robust the BBB is compared to a RaspPi.

Oh I certainly get the benefits of a microcontroller vs a PC and why one might choose a PIC-based solution over a linux-based solution. I have also, amongst my various builds, built a brewery expansion board that had an in-board AT328P to interface with (Fun little board to work with). My confusion stems from people's complaints with the RasPi specifically having low I/O.

Without wishing to put you on the defensive BBB is better hardware in other respects IMO. Industrial grade TI chip versus mass produced Broadcom with dodgy USB and proprietary documentation. RPi power supply issues.

But we are making beer not nuclear weaponry

alien said:

Without wishing to put you on the defensive BBB is better hardware in other respects IMO. Industrial grade TI chip versus mass produced Broadcom with dodgy USB and proprietary documentation. RPi power supply issues.

But we are making beer not nuclear weaponry

Click to expand...

No worries, I don't believe the RPi is the end-all-be-all for brewery equipment, I just happen to use one in my pilot lab and will be using one in my commercial brewery once permits are finished.

I got a BBB for Xmas. I originally thought I was going to be building around it. I think for myself I will let bcs do all the hard work and the BBB keep the logs and show live data during brew day, and serve up video during wait times.

The BB white (original) version has been steeply discounted, it's down to $30 now which is in an absolute steal if you don't need HDMI.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/beagle-bone-p-1152.html?cPath=6_113

I have a BBB and m using it for a lot. It controls my rims tube via a pid, as well as controlling my pumps (3 12v and 1 120v), and I can control the flowrate of the 12v pumps with pwm. Each of the pumps has a flowmeter so I can see flowrates and track transfer volumes. I also have four DS18B20 temp probes to track all my temps. All in all , I think the BBB has a lot to offer to brewers (though you obviously have to be able to program them, which can be a barrier).


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hightechlofi said:

I have a BBB and m using it for a lot. It controls my rims tube via a pid, as well as controlling my pumps (3 12v and 1 120v), and I can control the flowrate of the 12v pumps with pwm. Each of the pumps has a flowmeter so I can see flowrates and track transfer volumes. I also have four DS18B20 temp probes to track all my temps. All in all , I think the BBB has a lot to offer to brewers (though you obviously have to be able to program them, which can be a barrier).


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Click to expand...

Speaking for myself, I'd love to see your implementation. In particular, your flow control (PWM pump control and flow meters) would be fascinating to see. I'm thinking about doing something similar, but have thought to piggyback off something like the HeaterMeter bbq pit controller. If the BBB can handle this all on its own, all the better for simplifying the development.

Once I get the code a little cleaned up and further along I will be open sourcing it on github. I will be starting a new thread here for the project once I reach that point.


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I recently designed a prototyping cape for BB/BBB. It's completely open source, so feel free to copy, distribute, and adapt for your own purposes !

A proto cape is a definite must for this. I purchased a bunch of pcb screw terminals to connect everything to my BB. It really makes for a clean install.
It is actually very simple to have true PID control on the BBB. There are NodeJS libraries for practically everything- GPIO control, ds18b20 reading, PID control. They all execute necessary commands with a single line of code. I used socketIO for a low-latency way of communicating between the web browser and the node server. SSR control is instantaneous and will switch as fast as you can press the button. It eliminated the need to ever refresh the page or use a more demanding method like ajax to update the data sets.
A BBB/rPi is a great tool for brewing because of the available sensors and expansibility of the system. I've implemented timers that save state if you closed your browser and working on brewing calculators. You could really fully automate everything- import a timeline of events, start the timer, and watch the system do it all. But where's the fun in that right?

Here's what I've been able to code on the UI so far. It's worked perfectly for two brews.

BoneBrews,

I am looking forward to seeing your setup and code as well. I am at the deciding stage of whether to go RPI or BB/BBB.

-G

Just a round-up of BBB based or compatible brewing projects that I'm aware of.

Brewery Automation
BoneBrews (as the author posted here): http://www.bonebrews.com/
StrangeBrew Elsinore (works on BBB): https://github.com/DougEdey/SB_Elsinore_Server

I'm just starting my own:
MechaBrew: https://github.com/BrewSession/mecha-brew
(no working code yet, just started this week and my temp sensors have not arrived - FWIW, I'll be using PT100 RTD temp sensors, which is different, I think, than the ones above)


Fermentation controllers:
http://mybbbprojects.blogspot.com/2014/07/designing-brew-chamber-controller-part-1.html

hightechlofi said:

I have a BBB and m using it for a lot. It controls my rims tube via a pid, as well as controlling my pumps (3 12v and 1 120v), and I can control the flowrate of the 12v pumps with pwm. Each of the pumps has a flowmeter so I can see flowrates and track transfer .......

Click to expand...

Interested in how you implemented flow control with the BBB. I had it working with arduino but ran into a snag when i removed Arduino to go with the single board.

As far as the BBB and RPI, there is little that won't run on both platforms, especially when you start looking at the RPI Version 2. New RPI has 4 USB ports to the BBB's 1 which is a plus, I prefer BBB simply because I have used it longer. I have the SB Elsinore running on both RPI and BBB - no issues yet with either.