Brewtroller Brewery.. upgrade to new BT, or something else?

[dragonian]

We have a 3 vessel 10 gal electric RIMS brewery that we built several years ago.
It is currently running a brewtroller setup. I think v3.3(?) hardware.
It has been running "fine" with no real issues.. but also no real improvements for many years.

There are also 2 additional Brewtroller EX1 controllers running fermentation, and keezer/ line cooling duties.

The brew setup will shortly be moving locations from my brewing partner's house to mine.
I'm considering if now is the time to upgrade something.

I know that there is "new" hardware in the Brewtroller Phoenix, which seems like it would be a logical, "easy" upgrade.
I see the most useful feature would be ethernet connectivity.
Is there any value in this upgrade?

I've also seen that there are a number of posts regarding various pi setups.
I haven't read the majority of the the posts, but it looked like most involved a shield.. and sometimes in conjunction with an arduino.
Have they matured to a point that it's worth migrating to a pi setup?
What is the value?

Or does it make sense to do a hybrid setup, and hook the serial/usb control from the brewtroller to a pi, to connect the brewsetup to eth/wifi?

 

[BrunDog]

I certainly have an opinion!

 

[crane]

From what I've seen on the various Pi based projects is that they are not all that flexible with how the Software is written. They seem to be targeted towards the developer's setup and brewing process and you might have difficulties trying to adapt it to your setup. They all seem to have limitations in terms of SW programmability and/or sensor support.

This is why I went with a BCS originally. It allowed me to program the states to do what I wanted. Very flexible in that regard. The biggest limitation of the BCS is it's lack of support for any sensor besides temperature. Flow and volume are important things to monitor and control when moving towards more automation.

I'm currently looking into switching over to brucontrol to add in the volume and flow sensors I'm looking for. Similar to the BCS, you get to program it to run how you want it to. I haven't used it yet, but have looked at all the documentation and videos and it looks to be the most flexible thing out there in terms of programming control and sensor support. The trade off is that it's not a turnkey solution and requires writing scripts to automate processes.

 

[MrShake]

I certainly have an opinion as well.. but its distinctly biased!

I'd be happy to answer any questions you have, but I don't want to be pushy! I will note that there is some neat stuff coming down the pipe for firmware and accessory software and interfaces.