jcdillin said:
Hey Cryptochronolite
Has the BT been acting up on you? or is this just a consistency issue between batches?
No, it's been working. It's just that it is flaky. I wanted to make sure I'm doing it right, before I contacted you guys. This was the preliminary support path, I suppose.
So the Brewtroller appears to be mostly functional. Here's the issues I'm seeing:
I get gas valve chatter on my mash tun sometimes near finishing temps. (not the other burners). I lose the Brewtroller sometimes when the pumps fire simultaneously and the timers and state are all lost. (Brewtroller needs a RTC, badly). Logging math is inconsistent with display math, but i consider the logging capability essentially non-existent, just waiting for btnic replacement). I lose calibration for volume sensing, or it's inconsistent between brews. The alarm function is hit or miss, sometimes it just doesn't fire the alarm. The Vonnieda PID display needs a (better) channel selection function. And the Celsius math on a lot of routines needs worked on. I've fried a fistful of ULN2003s, and I have trouble getting the Brewtroller to "see" some of the DS temp sensors, sometimes (fixed by plugging/unplugging them). The UI is inconsistent (sometimes selections default to CONTINUE sometimes EXIT sometimes the next logical command is on top of the menu, sometimes it's all the way down. Adjusting temps and valves on the fly is just simply foolish. I don't know, I feel like it would take a lot of work to get this thing easy to use. While I'm ranting to someone that cares, I'll just throw in that the Brewtroller website is pathetic, too (not the oscsys website) All the important pages are often half-finished placeholders that are out of date or wrong. Show me how to navigate to a wiring diagram or a parts list. Show me a schematic for pressure sensors or show me any relevant procedures or howtos. That website is three years of junk pages all hobbled together and is the primary reason I'm here. I would love to say I will volunteer to clean it all up, but I've spent the months getting it running. It's now my own personal badge of pride.
The most frustrating thing is all the work that has been put into the project. I see tons of updates and releases and excellent response from guys like you. I see the plan and progress and all that.
It's frustrating that I simply don't have a system that I can trust to stay running through my brew day and finish my beer.
I honestly don't want to "work" on my brew-stand, I want it to brew beer. I have (the better part of) an electrical engineering degree, I've written thousands of lines of arduino code, so I "feel" like I know what I'm doing, I just don't feel like it's simple enough to be reliable. I'm sure I'm just doing things wrong, so I'm reaching out to people that brew with the Brewtroller to see what their tips are.
So, I'm not throwing it out, I'm (obviously) willing to work on it. Just having a hard time knowing where to start to clean up the issues.
Right now, I have a 12 hour double brew-day. I'd like to get that to six, I'll take eight. (it was seven before I "automated").
I'm planning on working out the non electronic hardware bugs my next brew day and then I want to start video taping my brews and finding efficiency steps that can be improved upon.
