Brewometer kickstarter thoughts - digital bluetooth hydrometer

[TorMag]

It depends on what they have the patent on. If they have a patent on taking gravity readings with a tilt device?

Honestly, if you have better ideas to improve the product, you should contacting them and work out a deal of some sort, get into bed with them. I am sure they have probably knocked some of your ideas around already.

 

[jimmayhugh]

It depends on what they have the patent on. If they have a patent on taking gravity readings with a tilt device?

Honestly, if you have better ideas to improve the product, you should contacting them and work out a deal of some sort, get into bed with them. I am sure they have probably knocked some of your ideas around already.

I did hardware/software/embedded systems design for the better part of 25 years. I'm not interested in "getting in bed" with anyone except my wife of 30 years.

The things that I do, I do because it interests me. If what I produce (TeensyPi, TeensyNet, TeensyNetESP8266, ESP8266 Temp Controller, et al) is useful to someone, they are welcome to it.

You seem to keep glossing over the fact that patents are not going to affect what I investigate, as I'm not interested in profitting from it.

 

[brewnz]

So I received my Brewometer the other week and after spending all weekend setting up the Brewpi (legacy) to play nicely with it (had to start from scratch multiple times!) and also setting up an old cellphone to push updates to @rlightner amazing brewstat.us website I can happily say that it was time well spent indeed!

I'm stoked to finally have some SG visibility on where my Beer is at...a brilliant device, buy one now!

 

[LBussy]

So I received my Brewometer the other week and after spending all weekend setting up the Brewpi (legacy) to play nicely with it (had to start from scratch multiple times!) and also setting up an old cellphone to push updates to @rlightner amazing brewstat.us website I can happily say that it was time well spent indeed!

I'm stoked to finally have some SG visibility on where my Beer is at...a brilliant device, buy one now!

I think this is the part that most interests me - the BrewPi integration. My only holdout is I've been messing around with the various flavors of BrewPi branches. Currently using the ESP8266. Now if that little guy had BTLE and I could use the Tilt with multiple chambers and BrewPi .... I'd be all in.

 

[thekraken]

I think this is the part that most interests me - the BrewPi integration. My only holdout is I've been messing around with the various flavors of BrewPi branches. Currently using the ESP8266. Now if that little guy had BTLE and I could use the Tilt with multiple chambers and BrewPi .... I'd be all in.

With multiple chamber set ups you run a single brewpi instance for each chamber. You would set up a Tilt for each one of these instances. The rpi3 has on board low power bluetooth, or you can buy a low power bluetooth usb dongle online for rpi1/2/zero, etc. Better get that wallet out

 

[LBussy]

See the problem with this forum is everyone is an enabler.

I have the RPi3, I guess I need to go look at the integration steps. Is that over on the BrewPi forums?

 

[thekraken]

See the problem with this forum is everyone is an enabler.

I have the RPi3, I guess I need to go look at the integration steps. Is that over on the BrewPi forums?

I believe so, I *think* someone linked them in this thread in the last few pages. Google will turn it up quickly enough.

It's been a while since I've messed with my brewpi installation. I believe some people are having trouble with the brewpi software and rpi 3. Maybe it was just in regard to extras like LCDs? I know I've seen @day_trippr discuss it, maybe he could fill you in. But it's probably a discussion for another thread, too.

 

[LBussy]

I believe so, I *think* someone linked them in this thread in the last few pages. Google will turn it up quickly enough.

This seems to be it:
https://github.com/sibowler/brewpi-brewometer

It's been a while since I've messed with my brewpi installation. I believe some people are having trouble with the brewpi software and rpi 3. Maybe it was just in regard to extras like LCDs? I know I've seen @day_trippr discuss it, maybe he could fill you in. But it's probably a discussion for another thread, too.

Bluetooth Serial and a few other things. Straight BrewPi works fine (for me). The issues people get seem to pop up when using multiple chambers (Bluetooth) or other things like RPints.

 

[brewnz]

This seems to be it:
https://github.com/sibowler/brewpi-brewometer

Yep that's the port of Brewpi to use.

The main Brewpi site has a bit of background info. if you get stuck etc.

https://community.brewpi.com/t/brewometer-integration/1674/59

 

[EmDubeu]

I'm certainly not a wiz on spreadsheets so how would you set up a graph to only measure the AVG SG and Temp for a day, and then just use one-day plots on the time line?

I'm not sure if you figured this out, or if someone else already responded (I tried to keep up with this thread, but it's massive!).

My solution to your request was the following:

On the Report sheet, add this formula to an empty cell in column A:
=AVERAGEIF(C2:C10029, ">=" & (TODAY()),D2: D10029)

The only drawback to using this is that if you don't have any data for the day you get a #DIV/0! error in the cell. If I only knew how to fix that....

Here's my published sheet that show's gauges of the AVG SG and AVG Temp. I'd suppose it would be fairly easy to create a graph type chart, but I'm not really sure if that would be beneficial to see.

 

[enkamania]

The only drawback to using this is that if you don't have any data for the day you get a #DIV/0! error in the cell. If I only knew how to fix that....

In Excel, you can use IFERROR to tell it what to do when there is an error

=IFERROR(AVERAGEIF(C2:C10029,">="&(TODAY()),D210029),"No Data")

 

[EmDubeu]

The only drawback to using this is that if you don't have any data for the day you get a #DIV/0! error in the cell. If I only knew how to fix that....

In Excel, you can use IFERROR to tell it what to do when there is an error

=IFERROR(AVERAGEIF(C2:C10029,">="&(TODAY()),D210029),"No Data")

NICE! That fixed that one. Thanks!

 

[EmDubeu]

Here's my google sheet for the Brewometer. I still haven't received my actual device yet, however I've been preparing for its arrival by creating my Brewometer cloud sheet. Here's my shared gauge/chart sheet that only shows the gauges and chart.

I added a few features like:

* Variable heartbeat setting - You can set how often the sheet updates the "Brewometer Status" field on the published guages/charts sheets. This check compares the Last Update (Reports!B13) to the Heartbeat Calculation field (Settings!A2). The Heartbeat Calculation field takes the current time "NOW()" and subtracts the desired heartbeat interval, which for me is stored in Settings!B2. I added some conditional formating to the Brewometer Status field that turns green or red based upon if the Brewometer is reporting data or not.

* Published Gauges sheet - Allows me to pull it up on my Android phone and just see a dashboard of pertinent information. This also includes Average Temperature gauge and an Average SG gauge. These gauges were created of the Reports! sheet by pulling data in a cell that contained the following formula: = IFERROR(AVERAGEIF(C2:C10029, ">=" & (TODAY()),D2: D10029),"No Data")

Work in progress...

 

[jimmayhugh]

So I kegged my "Otterly Mosaic" SMASH, retrieved the Tilt, cleaned it off, put in a new battery, and dropped it into a jug of water.

I also purchased a Light Blue Bean, the better to see how these things work.

I'm also still toying with ways to access the Tilt and the bean.

As I mentioned, my iPhone 3GS isn't usable, nor is my Nexus 10.

What I do have are a bunch of SOC boards; raspberry pi, odroidc2, pine64A, etc, Surely one of those can be used...

Not so much so far.

The closest I've gotten is with the Pine64A running RemixOS. I managed to connect the to the Tilt for about 30 seconds before the connection was dropped, never to return.

Now that the battery has been replaced, I'm going to monitor it with my linux program, and see how long the battery lasts.

More to follow.

 

[thekraken]

So I kegged my "Otterly Mosaic" SMASH, retrieved the Tilt, cleaned it off, put in a new battery, and dropped it into a jug of water.

I also purchased a Light Blue Bean, the better to see how these things work.

I'm also still toying with ways to access the Tilt and the bean.

As I mentioned, my iPhone 3GS isn't usable, nor is my Nexus 10.

What I do have are a bunch of SOC boards; raspberry pi, odroidc2, pine64A, etc, Surely one of those can be used...

Not so much so far.

The closest I've gotten is with the Pine64A running RemixOS. I managed to connect the to the Tilt for about 30 seconds before the connection was dropped, never to return.

Now that the battery has been replaced, I'm going to monitor it with my linux program, and see how long the battery lasts.

More to follow.

Did you get BT low energy stuff figured out? How often are you querying the Tilt?

 

[jimmayhugh]

Did you get BT low energy stuff figured out? How often are you querying the Tilt?

Not quite yet

In my e-mails to the Tilt folks, they indicated that they were going to be using the advertisements rather that the scratch with a linux implementation. I'm still sorting that out.

 

[brewslinger]

I know my program is far from complete but it works by listening for the broadcast transmissions alone and runs fine on a RaspberryPi 2 or below with the appropriate Bluetooth 4 dongle.
They seem to come in bursts and so the code is collapsing them out and only sending a message after a timeout of all data collected up to that point.
It should work OTB (with a few missing Python packages perhaps) on a RaspberryPi3.

My code sends the data to a MQTT server at this time and it's up to a 'listener' to listen for the data and do something with it.

The link again:
https://github.com/tmclane/brewmonitor

Maybe it can help someone get ahead on their project.

 

[phishie]

How do I clear the logging data so my chart only reflects the data of the beer I just started fermenting with the Tilt? I'm unable to find much info on working with the Google spreadsheet.

 

[55x11]

How do I clear the logging data so my chart only reflects the data of the beer I just started fermenting with the Tilt? I'm unable to find much info on working with the Google spreadsheet.

Perhaps this thread is now hi-jacked by "Tilt", whatever it is, but in brewometer google sheets you just select "Brewometer Color OR Beer:" selection in B-2 field of the spreadsheet. Super easy.

 

[phishie]

Perhaps this thread is now hi-jacked by "Tilt", whatever it is, but in brewometer google sheets you just select "Brewometer Color OR Beer:" selection in B-2 field of the spreadsheet. Super easy.

Thank you. Re: tilt, I'm fairly certain we're talking about the same product and it was renamed from brewometer to tilt: http://tilthydrometer.com/

Forgive me if I'm missing the joke.

 

[55x11]

No joke. Joke's on me apparently. I missed renaming and thought this is a new competitor brand.

 

[day_trippr]

wrt "Tilt", I wonder if Blichmann got cranky about "Brewometer" being one consonant from their "Brewmometer"...

Cheers!

 

[user 204491]

wrt "Tilt", I wonder if Blichmann got cranky about "Brewometer" being one consonant from their "Brewmometer"...

Cheers!

Was thinking the same thing.

 

[jimmayhugh]

How often are you querying the Tilt?

My software interrogates the Tilt once per minute, using cron. Here's the latest with a new battery:

I keep a bunch of CR123A batteries around for other projects, and this one had a shelf-life date of 2018, so I expected it to be around 85%-90% of capacity, based on my research and experience. I was surprised that the battery ran out so quickly. I'm going to re-do the test with a fresher battery.

 

[55x11]

My software interrogates the Tilt once per minute, using cron. Here's the latest with a new battery:

I keep a bunch of CR123A batteries around for other projects, and this one had a shelf-life date of 2018, so I expected it to be around 85%-90% of capacity, based on my research and experience. I was surprised that the battery ran out so quickly. I'm going to re-do the test with a fresher battery.

Hmm. My battery lasted about 4 months, from April to August, with constant use. Maybe it's your "every minute" cron routine interrogation that somehow drains battery?

 

[jimmayhugh]

Hmm. My battery lasted about 4 months, from April to August, with constant use. Maybe it's your "every minute" cron routine interrogation that somehow drains battery?

The Tilt issues an iBeacon advertisement about every 10 seconds, according to the Tilt FAQ:

Q. How often does the Tilt/Brewometer take measurement readings?

A. The Tilt/Brewometer will send updated measurement readings for temperature and specific gravity to your iOS or Android device every 10 seconds.

I was using the "scratch" readings that required a connection to the Tilt, read the parameters, and process the parameters, which I did with a cron setup once a minute. According to the Tilt developers, this takes more power (from an e-mail conversation with them):

We see you've connected using the scratches. While connected, in addition to the LED blinking, the radio is used more frequently. We're working on another solution for Raspberry Pi using the advertisement packets. iBeacon uses less battery life.

I finally found some code at the SwitchDoc Labs github that allow the RPI to act as an iBeacon scanner. Of course, it's in Python :smack:

Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Python other than I DON'T WANT TO LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE!!! Call me lazy, stubborn, old, whatever...

At any rate, I managed to modify it enough in order to A) suit my needs and B) incorporate it into my PHP script.

So I've got the code running, I'm collecting data samples once a minute, and we'll see where it goes.

 

[EmDubeu]

I have a Nexus 7 and it seems to work.

I have a nexus 7 running Android 5.1,1 and I can't connect to my Tilt via the app. What version of Android you running?

 

[BobOki]

It's not the os version that matters, it's the version of bt which I think has to be bt4.

 

[Vandulus]

It's not the os version that matters, it's the version of bt which I think has to be bt4.

To add on to this, not all Bluetooth 4.0 devices work as well as others. I bought a cheap Android tablet off of Amazon that said it was BT 4. Not only could I not pair it with the Tilt, it wouldn't pair with my BT speaker of keyboard either! I ended up buying my son's unused iPad Mini and the Tilt works flawlessly.

 

[BobOki]

We have had plenty of guys grab a Amazon Kindle and it work great with the Tilt, it kind of sounds like your device is actually defective. I would send that back to Amazon, they are great about replacements.