What's next for SW-controlled Brewing/Fermentation?

[ClearedHot]

Long-time lurker first-time poster, with a burning question for my fellow brew geeks:

Is it time to collectively re-think our approach to software in the Brewery?

I can hear the responses already "What a ridiculously vague question!" "What the hell are you on about?" "Can you help me get my RPi to work??"

Allow me to clarify:

I have just spent the better part of the last week reading all of the threads and Git docs from Elco, FuzzeWuzze, Thorrak and Pocketmon on their dev board projects and it has been extremely motivating to see the progress you all have made making pro-level tools available for homebrewers in recent years. It seems like a wild ride and one that's clearly taken a massive amount of time & passion on the part of a few to enable the many. We would all rather be making & drinking beer, I reckcon, than debugging code. Then there are the hundreds of beta testers bravely soldering & YouTubing their way toward a better brew. To all of you: I raise my glass, offer a hearty cheers and offer my sincere 'Thanks'.

As I settle down, sipping my perfectly lagered Pils and taking it all in, something is nagging me...

I just spent the month prior, moving into a new house and going full throttle on a home automation project. I am amazed at how quickly ZWave has matured and how easy it is to link, control and build intelligence into a thousand off-the-shelf devices. The devices take a mere minutes to install, connect, configure and integrate with a half-dozen access points, input devices and apps that do wodnerful things. No wires dangling precariously, no smell of burning PCBs or burnt fingers from soldering irons. But you all know this already.

Then I look to my brewhouse: To control power for just two devices and gather sensor data, it weeks of forum reading/posting, command lining and soldering. Wires are everywhere. A pile of dead or now-unsupported Chinesium bits are piling up in the corner. I see new dev boards coming out every day and tforum threads spiralling off into a dozen different directions. From a dev perspective, that's all great. Tinker away I say! But as a brewer, it's distracting, confusing, frustrating and only sometimes, enjoyable.

But three or four years on into these projects, it's not much faster, better or cheaper. Maybe it's only one command to install (rarely) and 2 bits instead of 3 to build & wire. Meanwhile, today, I am able to compose symphonies of IoT from my phone.

So I pose the question again, with slightly more specificity:

Have we all jumped down the dev board hole and now can't get ourselves out?

I'm sure there is someone out there who has already figured out that a Zwave outlet can turn on their pump with IFTTT with a hacked sensor and dump the data into Google Sheets. At least one person has figured out, just for the hell of it, to use Alexa to turn on a heating coil. The tech is there, people are using and coding it so I'm not worried that it will get here soon enough.

What's bothering me is I don't see the individual visions for the future or the community having a discussion about how to take advantage of new tech. We're still flashing firmware and waiting on rotary encoder support.

It's one thing to build the best ferm chamber for your physical space and budget allow, but software doesn't work like that. We stand on the shoulders of giants and don't waste time reinventing the wheel. Most of the time, we know when to kill a project and start fresh.

TL;DR. So what?

If you're still reading, [thank you] here is my 2019 wishlist for our brew-ware community to chew on:

• I wish we had a more cohesive vision (or a discussion, at least) as homebrewers and tinkerers on where we want software-driven homebrewing to go next
• I wish we had the time and help to make our solutions simpler and easy for anyone to use
• I wish our projects were just as accessible to entry-level brewer as they are to hardcore HBT lifetime supporters
• I wish the professional brewing industry was looking to us first to find ways to reduce cost, brew smarter and solve big brewhouse problems.
• I wish homebrew developers and engineers had more access to industry financial support and advice to turn their project into small businesses

It's safe to say the beer has never tasted better, so I don't need to add that to the list. I just sense an opportunity to accelerate the next phase of software-defined beer and want to know how I can help make it happen.

If that means shutting up and supporting your Kickstarter, fine. Just don't tell me Beersmith and BrewPi are the best we can hope for in 2019. There are way too many smart people around here with spare time & money to say we've reached The Promised Land.

What tech are you excited about?
Is your homebrew club also hosting hack-a-thons?
Are you Cal Poly guys & gals building an incubator with secret VC from ABInBev? On second thought, don't answer that.
Is your company selling a widget that can make our brew days or debug sessions easier?

Share it with the rest of us. We're all hanging on the edge of our keyboards and the keg is getting low.

Cheers,
CJ

 

[biertourist]

How in the @#$@# did this not get any replies?

 

[Thorrak]

Way too open a question

 

[day_trippr]

Tl,dr...

 

[robfar]

Just do it!

 

[Thorrak]

Without attempting to speak for OP, here are the answers to the questions I think are being asked:

Is the DIY nature of a lot of these projects overly complicated for the average homebrewer? Yep. A big part of why I designed Fermentrack was because despite being a "techie" I hated trying to get BrewPi up and running. Of course, I'd argue even Fermentrack is too complicated for most users - but I think it's a step in the right direction. @LBussy is doing the same thing for classic BrewPi, though, so I think people are starting to address this.


What tech are you excited about? For brewing? No idea. I love my PicoBrew Z1. I'm also looking forward to the Stasis (even though I haven't placed a preorder just yet).


Is your homebrew club also hosting hack-a-thons? I'm not part of a club, so I can't answer. If any clubs near NYC want to host a hack-a-thon build-a-BrewPi night though let me know. Happy to come help out.


Are you Cal Poly guys & gals building an incubator with secret VC from ABInBev? BUD just sold off Northern Brewer, so if you are, I hope you have a backup plan.


Is your company selling a widget that can make our brew days or debug sessions easier? Nope. Want to write me a giant check to burn learning how to build a marketable product? If so, PM me. Always willing to spend someone else's money - and who knows, perhaps we can make a viable product in the end.


One of the great things about the community is that anyone who wants to build/maintain their own project is capable of doing so. Just because PicoBrew's Z exists doesn't prevent someone from building a Brutus. If you think that the complexity in a project prevents mass uptake, go fix it! As I mentioned, that's why Fermentrack exists. Go make something simpler.

 

[LBussy]

Thanks for the mention @Thorrak.

Here's what I think: Yes, there's fantastic home automation capabilities now. However you speak of the need/want/desire to apply this maturing field to home brewing. One of the problems is there's no true standard for automation yet, and the entry cost (time and money) is relatively high. Your own words betray you:

I just spent the month prior, moving into a new house and going full throttle on a home automation project.

(Emphasis mine.)

There's still a lot of fiddling to automation of any kind. "Simpler" often means removing or hiding customization and configurability. And sure as sh*t as soon as you make it easy for someone to click a button and buy a purple PCB, you get a request for a one-click way to buy one of a different color.

Yes, this happened.

So, there's a balance. Plus, and don't discard this notion: we are home brewers. By our nature we don't do things the easy way. We do them because we think we can do it better, or we want the satisfaction of saying "I made this" or "this is exactly how I want it." Sure you could say that after plugging in a few Z-wave modules, but that's the "extract brew" of automation.

Anyway, should we look at those things? Sure. The problem I personally have (and I'm sure @pocketmon, @Thorrak @ame and others who have gone down this rabbit-hole will agree) is that as a hobby developer I don't have the time, or the money (dev kits for these things often require expensive licensing) to pursue things like this. Time really is the biggie. It's tough to keep up. Raspberry Pi 4 is out, Buster was just released, and GitPython announced no more support for Python 2.7. You would be shocked if you knew how much time that is going to cost me.

I'm rambling, however I'm really not trying to make a single cogent argument. There are many reasons "why" to certain things but there is one truth: Nothing is stopping you from making the next thing.

Here's what goes through my head when someone wants to do something different with these tools:

Now you remind me a lotta my younger days,
With your knuckles a clenchin' white
But boy I'm gonna sit right here and sip this beer all night
And if there's somethin' that you gotta gain to prove by winnin' some silly fight
Well okay, I quit, I lose, you're the winner.

 

[pocketmon]

What LBussy said.

 

[mojonojo]

That we have any projects at all is a miracle - the amount of time energy and effort dedicated to these projects is immense, all are focused on different things, with different approaches with different outcomes.

The problem with simplifying is what do you focus your simplification on - For you it may be simple - 3v, fridge with heat and cool - No use for me - i use 2v BIAB/RIMS & Glycol cool conicals. Do you build it all under one system like CBPI, and when one part fails the whole lot does, or do you break it into discrete units like brewpiless? do you use a raspberrypi at $45 or do you use ESP8266 at $4? what language do you use? do you want it remote monitor-able? all seemingly simple questions - however every user will have different usage cases, and of course every user wants an outcome that suits them perfectly.

Collaboration does happen, within scope - Thorraks boards work under poketmon's software, there is collaboration and knowledge sharing, but applied very differently to different projects.

your assumption "

• I wish we had a more cohesive vision (or a discussion, at least) as homebrewers and tinkerers on where we want software-driven homebrewing to go next"

you assume there is a community of developers that are ready able and willing to work together on a single project - this is not going to happen - not unless you can find funding to pay people to develop it, people develop solutions to their own problems, and then widen the scope to the general public.

Again you say "I wish the professional brewing industry was looking to us first to find ways to reduce cost, brew smarter and solve big brewhouse problems."

The problems major breweries suffer from are nothing like you assume they are - brewhouse automation is a once in a lifetime purchase (and probably quite cheap in comparison to the rest of the investment), probably from the brew-plant manufacturer, Automation whilst important, is a solved problem in the brewery business - its been solved for 30 years, and a homebrew open source system on a raspberry pi is not going to be adopted as it cant be trusted - people still trust solid state, burn-on silicone - because it doesn't crash - whilst the cost of loosing a home-brew batch is sad - the cost of loosing 40bbl of IPA is crippling to a brewery, primarily on a time basis (although the cost is also brutal)

Big breweries are looking at solutions to brewhouse efficiency, reducing tank-time, increasing sales, reducing held-stock, just in-time delivery, order prediction, CRM systems to increase sales - because of this breweries are investing in software and automation solutions - just you don't see them - 'Brewery management software' they solve problems that homebrewers just dont have.

 

[LBussy]

"Someone could" design a framework for this, make it open source, and support widespread adoption. Then, anyone desiring to utilize brew-process functionality could leverage that framework to inject the process into it. CBPi tried this but his oppressive licensing causes me (and many others) to just go a different direction.

Elco and company are doing that with BrewBlox, but their approach was to semi-saturate the project with their functionality/solutions, meaning there's not immediately any need/desire to extend it. Their release process is also so slow, if you wanted to extend it you'd be left waiting for years for them to finish things. They are commercial, so there's capital there to work with, but it's still not enough to pull this off cleanly (IMHO). I LOVE Elco (in a manly beer-way) for his contributions to the landscape, but one can only say "we're releasing this soon" so many times before people go a different direction.

(That said, at some point I will likely at least poke at it out of curiosity.)

Collaboration does happen, within scope - Thorraks boards work under poketmon's software, there is collaboration and knowledge sharing, but applied very differently to different projects.

We talk more than you might think, but what's lacking, other than altruism, is a reason to merge ideas. Fermentrack works, BrewPi Remix works, BrewPiLess works ... why fundamentally change?