I looked hard at Kal clones, CBPi, and BruControl when I was getting started.
All systems need an enclosure of some kind to house both the power devices like breakers, SSRs, and contactors, as well as the sensors and relays that are used on the low-voltage side of the system. Right out of the gate, there is a substantial financial commitment required to build a safe, reliable system. A UL-listed enclosure, UL-listed power equipment, DIN rail, mid-level wiring devices like terminal blocks, tray, breakers, fuses, relays, power supplies, SSRs, heat sinks, etc., etc. will get the enclosure north of $1,000 in a frightful hurry. Arguments that an automated electric brewery control panel can be built in a safe, reliable manner for $300 do not seem realistic to me.
Kal is a self-admitted semi-Luddite, and doesn't have any interest in microcontrollers or automation, and his reasons for sticking to PID controllers and mechanical switches work well for him.
The more I dug into it, the more I found the automation side appealing, so I cut Kal clones from my list. When evaluating the two remaining choices, what settled the argument was the number of posts here and on Reddit and other forums that went on and on about the various builds on GitHub for the RPi solution that were mostly howls of anguish from frustrated brewers whose RPi system had just bricked because of a problem with the code for some new feature that some unknown person had posted. It's kind of the story of open source in general. Yes, some fantastic open source stuff has been developed (Torvalds is a frickin' genius), but at the expense of a lot of very tedious debugging along the way. I wanted to brew, not debug.
I opted for BruControl for several reasons:
- Arduino hardware is stable, cheap, and plentiful
- I don't have to do any programming
- I can configure an incredible amount of capability (e.g. @Die_Beerery's rig)
- I can develop a script that will automate more than I care to think about (again, see Die_Beerery's rig)
- @BrunDog provides fantastic support
- It does NOT require a dedicated computer (I ran it for over a year on the MacBook issued by my employer)
The ability to add another microcontroller and integrate it into the BruControl environment without so much as a burp gives me the flexibility I was looking for. As my system and my skills grow, it's easy to add on without having to break budgets. Without any question, I feel like I made the right choice, even after having lived and brewed with it for almost two years.