"Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln
I prefer pouring priming sugar directly into bottles for two main reasons which are less oxygen exposure and even distribution. However, I don't have the patient to use a syringe or spoon for each bottle, so I created an automatic sugar dropper to dose right amount of sugar solution to make my bottling day easier.
The heart of the SugarDropper is a DC-motor-driven peristaltic pump while the brain is an Arduino. Peristaltic pumps are commonly used in titration and are excellent for this application because they are easy to sanitize and self-priming. Step-motor-driven peristaltic pumps might be more precise, but DC-motor-driven pumps are cheaper and lighter, yet precise enough. The average error of my current setup is smaller than 0.1g, or 0.0035oz if you will, for one bottle.
Using my SugarDropper is so easy and convenient. On bottling day, I would make 50°Brix sugar solution from table sugar and water of equal wieght. I would try dosing one dose to confirm that no calibration is needed. It is usually true if no change have made to the pump, tube, and density of sugar solution. Input of priming information is necessary so that the amount of sugar can be calculated based on the volumes of bottles which will be changed on the fly. I usually use multiple sizes of bottles based on what are available.I designed it to be single hand operation, so that I am dose sugar into another bottle while bottling.
Enough words. Let's see how it works.
It looks crappy but operates slickly. The detail build as well as source code can be found on Github.
- Abraham Lincoln
I prefer pouring priming sugar directly into bottles for two main reasons which are less oxygen exposure and even distribution. However, I don't have the patient to use a syringe or spoon for each bottle, so I created an automatic sugar dropper to dose right amount of sugar solution to make my bottling day easier.
The heart of the SugarDropper is a DC-motor-driven peristaltic pump while the brain is an Arduino. Peristaltic pumps are commonly used in titration and are excellent for this application because they are easy to sanitize and self-priming. Step-motor-driven peristaltic pumps might be more precise, but DC-motor-driven pumps are cheaper and lighter, yet precise enough. The average error of my current setup is smaller than 0.1g, or 0.0035oz if you will, for one bottle.
Using my SugarDropper is so easy and convenient. On bottling day, I would make 50°Brix sugar solution from table sugar and water of equal wieght. I would try dosing one dose to confirm that no calibration is needed. It is usually true if no change have made to the pump, tube, and density of sugar solution. Input of priming information is necessary so that the amount of sugar can be calculated based on the volumes of bottles which will be changed on the fly. I usually use multiple sizes of bottles based on what are available.I designed it to be single hand operation, so that I am dose sugar into another bottle while bottling.
Enough words. Let's see how it works.
It looks crappy but operates slickly. The detail build as well as source code can be found on Github.
