Jared311
Well-Known Member
Sorry for the long post, you might want to top off your beer again before sitting down to this one. I have a habit of confusing others with my poor wording.
So I have designed my first revision of a temperature controller board. It connects to 8 mini temperature sensor boards I designed. Each one sits in a custom made thermal well that can be threaded into a 1/2" coupling that has been welded into the keg wall. This is going to allow me to monitor the mash temperature and see any temperature differentials. Yeah, I know... its overkill, but I actually enjoy building custom hardware. My board communicates with my laptop via USB and I have already wrote software that takes in the temperatures and determines what duty cycle the heating element should be running at. Then the computer talks back to the temperature controller and tells it what duty cycle it should generate. This is where I am stuck. I am not sure yet what frequency I want to pulse width modulate the 220VAC relay which will apply power to my heating element. I was thinking of starting around 1Hz and seeing how well that works. However I am worried that I will burn out my relays pretty fast if I am firing them twice a second. Anyone know what frequency their PID controllers work at?
So I have designed my first revision of a temperature controller board. It connects to 8 mini temperature sensor boards I designed. Each one sits in a custom made thermal well that can be threaded into a 1/2" coupling that has been welded into the keg wall. This is going to allow me to monitor the mash temperature and see any temperature differentials. Yeah, I know... its overkill, but I actually enjoy building custom hardware. My board communicates with my laptop via USB and I have already wrote software that takes in the temperatures and determines what duty cycle the heating element should be running at. Then the computer talks back to the temperature controller and tells it what duty cycle it should generate. This is where I am stuck. I am not sure yet what frequency I want to pulse width modulate the 220VAC relay which will apply power to my heating element. I was thinking of starting around 1Hz and seeing how well that works. However I am worried that I will burn out my relays pretty fast if I am firing them twice a second. Anyone know what frequency their PID controllers work at?