Idea: use a cheap digital scale for keg level

[aggiejason]

At the bar tonight I was discussing with a buddy about the many options for determining the level of beer remaining in a keg. While many of us rely on audio (ie. The wet “whoosh”
Sound when your keg is empty), others want to get fancy with their digital tap lists, etc. There are a variety options including load cells, strips on the outsides of the kegs, floats, etc, but they have all seemed either too expensive or not automated enough.

At the bar, we determined that the load cell was the most practical option but that it seemed too expensive and cumbersome. One of my buddies who thinks outside the box had a great idea!

You can buy a digital scale off of amazon for about $12. (That meets my “cheap” meter. ). What if you hacked said $12 scale to read out digitally to RaspberryPints or other software.

I thought it was a genius cheap idea. I haven’t had time to investigate options myself but thought I’d throw it out to the community to see if it was an idea that “stuck”.

We’ve done it for temp control. What about keg weight?!

Hope this idea over (too many) beers brews into something useable !

 

[day_trippr]

The use of digital scales for tracking kegs has been suggested countless times. Not sure that anyone ever actually does it, however. There is/was a load-cell based keg tracking project on HBT, don't know what the current development status is, and due to the drift behavior of load cells there are issues with that solution as well.

RaspberryPints doesn't work with mass, it works by tracking the volume of beer dispensed from a user-supplied initial volume, so the idea wouldn't work with that application. But let's assume there's some other software package one might exploit.

Most if not all digital scales turn themselves off to conserve battery life. We have a handful of various digital units here and they all do the same thing. So you'd need to find a way to defeat that feature, but let's assume that can be done, too. While we're at it we'll assume the scale would be fed with a power cord and not depend on batteries as that would be a pita to manage for more than a keg or two.

Then there's the hostile environment. The cold and wet one finds on the keezer floor is not a prescription for digital device longevity.

But where there's a will there'll be a way. Be sure to take lots of pictures when you get this working

Cheers!