Havent been around much lately as I am in the process of moving and training and havent been able to brew since beginning of July
But I am planning an update to my system to try and correct a couple flaws that I dont like and make it nicer.
First Im going to redo the control box as Im not completely happy with how it turned out. Mainly the playstation joystick interface. While the idea was great, making a nice mounting for it is a pain in the ass for the tools I have. Also I wanted a little more automation in everything. So what Im doing is going to build a new control box, most likely from plexiglass, and redo the wiring. Im planning on removing most of the switches and remove the single element limitation from manual control. Second, I want to be able to run the element in the boil kettle during the mash as to heat sparge water and do a true Brutus20 style to increase efficiency, dont worry I have a method to handle the two elements on 30amps.
What Im planning is to use one of
these as my user interface. Planning a multiple page display to control each vessel through the touch screen. The arduino code will handle the safety of running multiple elements on 30amps. The reasoning behind this is to allow the sparge water to be heated. What it will do is only power one element at a time, but it will control which element to balance the power, it will give priority to the mash element to maintain temps, but will switch to the boil element whenever the mash is at temp. This way I can heat sparge water while mashing.
The control box will have a hardware on/off switch for the master power and then the LCD touchscreen and thats it for the outside. The inside will be the same minus the extra relays that were to prevent both elements going at once, since that will be controlled by the arduino. All in all I think it will be a cleaner finish and a lot less wiring to complete with the arduino as right now I have inputs to detect the position of each switch which is a mess of wiring.
Wont get to start on this build until december though as Im currently traveling for work training, but I am gonna work on all the code for the build