Slowly building a arduino controlled electric brewery

I have been actually making progress on my home brewery and wanted to setup a post here so people can add pointers on things to change due to experience....

I went to school for chemical engineering and now i use very little of the skills that I learned at work so I needed a big project at home to actually flex my engineering skills. What better than an automated electric brewery where I do as much of the design and programing myself as is reasonable for a married dude with 2 children. Overall plan is to follow Kal's website and setup an all grain electric brewery in my garage.

anyway some pictures

Brewing table I built


with 3 20 gallon 304SS kettles bought from my local homebrew shop http://www.brewbrothers.biz/



I also punched some holes in the kettles last year... and snagged a bunch of fittings from http://www.bargainfittings.com/ then we had our second little girl and I had no time... fast forward to a few months ago when i found some time.

Picked up some tri-clamp element adapters from brewers hardware. This is an awesome way to mount electrical heating elements to your kettles... but of course I picked these up after I bought rippled heating elements which don't fit through the enclosure without lots of bending. So I also snagged 2 straight 5500W ULWD elements which fit nicely.
https://www.brewershardware.com/TC15F10NPSCOV.html


Took the HLT and BK to a local welding shop and got some stubby 1.5" tri-clamp ferrules welded on. I had already used a 1-1/4" punch to make holes in both as I was going with Kal's mounting method, so I had the shop widen the hole and weld the ferrule flush with the inner wall of the kettle. They charged me $100 for 2 fittings so I think I was overcharged.... I found a guy in Portland on Craigslist that will do the work for $30 a hole from the pics he's a better welder too. I will look him up when I start upgrading the rest of my fittings to triclamp... but that's a bit down the road.
http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/for/3847525286.html




Found a really nice 42" range hood on craigslist that I've badly mounted in the garage... but hell it's secure, and it actually came out level so I'm happy.



Picked up a really nice DIN mount control panel kit from Electric Brewing Supply. This kit is wonderful and inexpensive relative to what i was looking at piecing together the same components from other sites. This is the BCS kit, though I don't have a BCS it is generic for any control system. Also, I have the 50A kit as I plan on starting the cleaning cycle by heating cleaning fluid in the HLT while the boil is going.
http://www.ebrewsupply.com/ebrew-kits/bcs-2-element-2-pumps-50a-kit.html
And wandered to the local industrial surplus store and found a good deal on a enclosure
https://www.surplusgizmos.com/

so now I have some basic progress on a control panel. You can see the large heatsink just off to the side that will be used to dissipate heat off the SSRs


I still have to make a cutout for my 20X4 character LCD display for my Arduino and I found a cheep Chinese combo V/A meter on ebay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-AC-...681?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35c7283119

I currently am developing on an Arduino Mega ADK, which has USB host functionality. At first I entertained the Idea of developing an Android application to control the brewery from an Android tablet, but with my limited programing experience writing up an Android app is a bit over my head a the moment. Also, writing for Android would restrict my options for control platforms so my eventual goal is to host a website on the local network. So instead I have an old 10" Dell Atom based tablet that neither the wife nor I use anymore that I will be mounting to the open area on the upper right of the control panel and use as the front end for the Arduino. The tablet will be running code I've written in Processing, which is an open sourced java based programing language which an emphasis on generating visual interaction.

Plan for this weekend is to finish up cutting holes in the control panel and hopefully finishing wiring up. Then I can work on stuffing the Arduino in. I hope to be actually heating water before the end of the month.


I'd like to thank Kal for his wonderful website that has guided me through making a all electric setup
http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/

and Open Source Control Systems for providing software inspiration for many little things in my code which is nowhere near functional yet
https://www.oscsys.com/

Sounds familiar. I'm (slowly) building a 30A three-vessel RIMS system. I'm going to get it brewing as simply as I can, and then continually add complexity and automation as budget & skill allows.

I'm pretty time-limited as well, so my build is also going to be a long-term project.

I'll be watching your build closely; good luck with it!

This looks great! I'm looking at putting together something similar, but considering using a BeagleBone to open up some more options for programming. I'm pretty near you; perhaps we could get together to chat?

Yeah, a beaglebone or RasbPi are in the plan for things I want to play with. At this point though I just want to be able to heat water. Then my initial homebrews can fuel further endeavours.

Nice looking rig!

located some spare time




still have lots of work to do formulating how best to lay out my wiring...

a tad more time... Don't actually have the tablet mounted yet, but gives an idea of the final product.

Painful question at this point.... What's the cost on this build? I am cringing BTW.
This is looking very nice and it'll be a long time coming but I might build this eventually.

Since it is so spread out it's hard to put a number on, but I'd venture I've only put in about $5K or so.

How are you planning on mounting the tablet to the case?

JWBC said:

How are you planning on mounting the tablet to the case?

Click to expand...

Right now, plan is to hold a back plate with screws tapped through the front of the panel. Slide the tablet in and snug it up with some nuts on the back of the plate. I didn't want it to be permanent as I do want to level up towards more industrial quality components as time/skill/money allow. Tablet was just sitting around and is easier to build front ends there as opposed to in Arduino.

As for progress... all the AC work is done and wired in a somewhat ugly manner. Currently putting together some quick code to start evaluating PID settings and the best way to ramp to boiling temperature while I wait for some other assorted stuff to arrive to allow me to actually wire up the spa panel i got to the other side of the garage.

Got my boil kettle all setup. Did a quick test with a chugger pump and it yielded an okay whirlpool. Not terribly impressed though

cool!

And got some dedicated hot and cold water lines T'd into the garage for brewing.

The cold and streptococcus swept through the family this weekend, but I preserved.

Got my nasty large gauge wire shoved through conduit. I did a summer working as an apprentice electrician, but I must have been in way better shape then. Running wire sucks.

Got the spa panel hung and wired along with the main control panel. Finally got the chance to test my craigslist condensate hood and find the button to turn on the lights is non-functional, so I had to yank it open and splice the lights directly to the main power.



Everything works mostly!! Now I just have to work on the arduino side of things.

Had my boil element all hooked up and chucked together a quick Processing/Arduino sketch combo to play around with PID settings. Verified ground was good, verified resistance across element was good, verified power at outlet on panel was good and not shorted anywhere....

Second power hit the element... POP. GFCI trips, BoilKettle breaker trips. Troubleshot components, and found that the 25A relay for the boil kettle has failed closed... I'm guessing a faulty coil that somehow fused the relay closed when current was applied. Coil was functioning perfectly well just prior without current...

anyway, I was able to swap over to using the HLT circuit to control my element without issues!!! YAY I'M HEATING WATER!

Blauhung said:

Had my boil element all hooked up and chucked together a quick Processing/Arduino sketch combo to play around with PID settings. Verified ground was good, verified resistance across element was good, verified power at outlet on panel was good and not shorted anywhere....

Second power hit the element... POP. GFCI trips, BoilKettle breaker trips. Troubleshot components, and found that the 25A relay for the boil kettle has failed closed... I'm guessing a faulty coil that somehow fused the relay closed when current was applied. Coil was functioning perfectly well just prior without current...

anyway, I was able to swap over to using the HLT circuit to control my element without issues!!! YAY I'M HEATING WATER!

Click to expand...

Any updates?

I am working on the same system for my brewery but cant get my arduino code to work. I am trying to use the brewtroller code but still cant get the hardware profile worked out. Will you share the code and libraries you are using?

Thanks,
Electro

Have you done anything with the mega that you couldnt have done with the uno? Im guessing the mega might be required to interface with that tablet.

Do you think you interface with the tablet could be done wirelessly so you didnt have to mount it and had a kind of remote control for the brew setup?

Curious because what youve done here is almost exactly what I'm working on. I love you're description at the begging too,, engineer not using much engineering at work but looking to flex the ol engineering muscle,, same here but I'm an EE.

Looks awesome! Hoping to do something like this in the future.

With that control box what do you plan on using the arduino for

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Home Brew mobile app

Another pretty awesome piece of software that works with the Arduino and makes graphical interfaces is LabVIEW - if you're a student somewhere, it's $20 for the student edition at Studica.com. I've played with it a little bit on a mega and it works well.

A really easy way to make an Arduino PC-interface is MegunoLinkpro. It works really well with a touchscreen and it's so much easier to put all the "buttons" on the screen than use real switches. And there's no need for programming on the Meguno side.