Brewpi and Raspberry Pints integration

[Sidman]

Just got my Raspberry pints hooked up and running and now I am ready to tackle converting a 3 zone fermentation set up from stc's to Brewpi. Is it easier to go with a second pi or to add the arduino etc on to the existing?

Thanks for any advice

 

[day_trippr]

The load on a RaspberryPints host is tiny, except when loading a 3 years long database into phpmyadmin.
As well, the load on the BrewPi host is minimal, save for refreshing a lengthy temperature graph.

About the only reason to use a separate RPi host is distance: if your tap list system isn't within USB, Bluetooth, or Wifi range of your ferm chambers, that'd be reason for a second 'Pi.

fwiw, my keezer, ferm chambers and conditioning fridge are all within "Bluetooth range" of each other, and I run R'Pints with a half dozen flow meters, and four full "instances" of BrewPi (3 Bluetooth "minion" actuator units, 1 USB), all on the same RPi2B. Zero issues...

Cheers!

 

[Sidman]

The load on a RaspberryPints host is tiny, except when loading a 3 years long database into phpmyadmin.
As well, the load on the BrewPi host is minimal, save for refreshing a lengthy temperature graph.

About the only reason to use a separate RPi host is distance: if your tap list system isn't within USB, Bluetooth, or Wifi range of your ferm chambers, that'd be reason for a second 'Pi.

fwiw, my keezer, ferm chambers and conditioning fridge are all within "Bluetooth range" of each other, and I run R'Pints with a half dozen flow meters, and four full "instances" of BrewPi (3 Bluetooth "minion" actuator units, 1 USB), all on the same RPi2B. Zero issues...

Cheers!

Thanks day-trippr. I appreciate the advice as you and fuzze_wuzze seem to be the foremost experts on this kind of thing. My ferementation chambers are in the garage and the bar is in the back yard about 100ish feet away so they are all on the same wifi and perhaps close enough to blue tooth. Any tips or tricks on installing Brewpi on my existing Pi that I should look out for? Also how do I set up the seperate web address part of this so that I can access both pints and brewpi from the web?
Thanks again,
Sid

 

[day_trippr]

100 feet through a house is likely going to be outside Bluetooth range, but wifi should work.

For access within your LAN you'll use the same ip address for the RPi but specify a different path. Eg: to see my R'Pints taplist I use http://192.168.1.200/index.php and to see my BrewPi instances running on the same system I use http://192.168.1.200/brewpiN/index.php (where N = 1 through 4 corresponding to the four instances).

For access outside your LAN you need to set your gateway or router for "port-forwarding", then use discrete port numbers in the url to get the router to send the requests to the correct system. For the same targets as above, the external URLs would be http://xx.xxx.xxx.xx:85/index.php and
http://xx.xxx.xxx.xx:85/brewpiN/index.php, respectively...

There are some idiosyncrasies with any BrewPi installation depending on which OS and the connectivity method used. I advise installing BrewPi into its own folders to avoid stepping on any other packages. For instance, RaspberryPints installs into /var/www (or /var/www/html) and if you install BrewPi into the same folder it'll whack a couple of R'Pints files.

There are two file trees for each BrewPi instance, with the default installation putting one rooted under /home/brewpi and the other under /var/www (or /var/www/html). If you intend to run a single BrewPi instance, I would root the latter folder in /var/www/brewpi (or /var/www/html/brewpi).

For multiple BrewPi instances, each needs to be in its own folder. I use /home/brewpi1 .../home/brewpi2, etc, and /var/www/brewpi1, /var/www/brewpi2, etc. You can then use the URL to point to each instance.

You should consider moving this conversation to the quasi-official BrewPi thread where you'll have a full audience of BrewPi users to draw from...

Cheers!

 

[meatballosaurus]

Did you ever get this going Sidman? I was just looking into trying to do the same thing.