CraftBeerPi - Raspberry Pi Software

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Question about the CraftbrewPi display when using an iSpindel.
I get the iSpindel data showing up on the display, but sometimes CraftbeerPi doesn't show both "fermenters" (one is a fermenter, the other a DIY glycol chiller tank).
If I press refresh, it might show both, otherwise it seems hit or miss.
Why would the web page show two different versions?
One lets me graph the iSpindel gravity data. The other one doesn't.

iSpindelv1.png

iSpindelv2.png

I'm wondering if it might be because my fermenter is in the garage and maybe the iSpindel isn't very powerful on the WiFi front - and might sometimes lose connection to the WiFi network? Not sure, because both my fermenter and brewing CraftbeerPi controllers are also out in the garage. The Fermenter is running on a Pi Zero W and the brew controller is on a Pi 3B.
 
Last edited:
Looks like the first picture are the Brewing pane, it has the temps, and actuators.
The second one is the Fermentation pane.
So the first shows the kettle, not the fermenter.

rkhanso said:
Question about the CraftbrewPi display when using an iSpindel.
I get the iSpindel data showing up on the display, but sometimes CraftbeerPi doesn't show both "fermenters" (one is a fermenter, the other a DIY glycol chiller tank).
If I press refresh, it might show both, otherwise it seems hit or miss.
Why would the web page show two different versions?
One lets me graph the iSpindel gravity data. The other one doesn't.

View attachment 673668

View attachment 673669

I'm wondering if it might be because my fermenter is in the garage and maybe the iSpindel isn't very powerful on the WiFi front - and might sometimes lose connection to the WiFi network? Not sure, because both my fermenter and brewing CraftbeerPi controllers are also out in the garage. The Fermenter is running on a Pi Zero W and the brew controller is on a Pi 3B.
Click to expand...
 
OK, so I got my raspbery pi yesterday and got it set up with raspian and craftbeerpi3. When I run craftbeerpi, it says it's running, but when I try to connect to it with a browser it says I can't connect. It just says the site can't be reached.

Any clue what's going on?
 
I'm in need of your help once again! I'm setting up a second CraftBeerPi to run my new fermentation chamber. I am once again in over my head but think I have my big problems figured out. You can see what I'm up to on this thread. I've dissected the refrigerator and identified the wiring I need, but I am have a heck of a time getting my CBP to work properly.

I've finally managed to get the system up and running. I am getting intermittent temp readings of 32 degrees F. Sometimes it seems to be for a few minutes, now it seems to be stuck on 32F permanently. I've tried tracing all the wires and checking connections. The probe shows up in the hardware settings. I can unselect it and then reselect it by it's address. So I think the probe hardware is working ok. I can put in an offset and have it show as 33F or whatever I set it to. I have wiggled all the wires, plugged and unplugged things, made sure the probe wires are not crossing motor wires or AC wiring.

Anybody have any suggestions for me?
 
Never mind.

I see now that the Pi just remembers the address of the probe. Even if I disconnect it it still shows up.

I tried bypassing my wiring and connected the DS18B20 directly to the pi and it works again. It's clearly a fault in my wiring. I think I'll re-make my wiring harness and try to build it with more integrity. I had decided to use ribbon cable to keep things looking neat, but I think those wires are just too fine for my ham handed electronic craftsmanship.
 
Has anyone used CraftbeerPi to control temps on a Kegerator?
I was looking at a kegerator on craigslist and the guy said the controller for it went out. I think he installed an Inkbird controller on it, but said it froze his beer once and he doesn't trust it any longer.
I'm wondering if he may have just programmed it wrong or wired it up wrong.

Thinking about buying this Kegerator for $125 (but it's set up for commercial 16gal kegs, not corny kegs) and am wondering if it's worth the risk or not. I'll have the expense of converting it over to use corny kegs and potential cost of fixing or replacing the temp control for it.
 
rkhanso said:
Has anyone used CraftbeerPi to control temps on a Kegerator?
I was looking at a kegerator on craigslist and the guy said the controller for it went out. I think he installed an Inkbird controller on it, but said it froze his beer once and he doesn't trust it any longer.
I'm wondering if he may have just programmed it wrong or wired it up wrong.

Thinking about buying this Kegerator for $125 (but it's set up for commercial 16gal kegs, not corny kegs) and am wondering if it's worth the risk or not. I'll have the expense of converting it over to use corny kegs and potential cost of fixing or replacing the temp control for it.
Click to expand...
I've done it before.
 
I’ve managed to get my second Craftbeerpi up and running. It is controlling a refrigerator for cooling and a reptile heater affixed to the cone of my conical for heating. I’m currently fermenting my first batch with the new setup.

The CBP seems to be doing a great job of holding temp to within a few tenths of a degree F. For some reason it seems to be controlling it to about 1.5 degrees above the set point. I’m set at 64 degrees and it has been averaging about 65.5 degrees the whole time. It has not needed to heat at all, so that is cooling through chamber temp. (Btw I’m using the PIDfermentationtemperature add on with the default PID settings.)

Any idea why it why it is controlling so precisely but over the set point?

I’m also wondering if anybody knows the logic the compressor delay uses. I have it set for 2 minutes. I think it is waiting two minutes after the compressor has run, but it seems to be regularly running the compressor for only a couple seconds then shutting down. Is this normal? Is it bad for my compressor?
 
Lalo_uy said:
Where did you find PIDfermentationtemperature?
I only see a cbpi_PIDFermentationChamber.
I wish a Pid exist using just a slow pwm over a electrovalve from the glycol chiller.
Click to expand...
Only in my head I’m afraid. I just remembered the name wrong. It is the one you reference.

I see in the GitHub there is a reference to taking out the delay. Doesn’t give much context for why or how though.
 
Hi everyone, I have just had to start fresh with my brewery today as I stuffed up an install of a different program that meant I needed to delete everything. Upon doing this, I seemed to have hit a wee issue that I see has been noted here before and the fix does not seem to be working. I am getting

Retrying (Retry(total=4, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'ProtocolError('Connection aborted.', BadStatusLine('No status line received - the server has closed the connection',))': /simple/gitdb/
Using cached https://www.piwheels.org/simple/gitdb/gitdb-4.0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
gitdb requires Python '>=3.4' but the running Python is 2.7.16
mv: cannot stat './config/splash.png': No such file or directory

I have tried doing pip install gitdb2==2.0.5 to no avail.

Can anyone help?

Regards
Sam
 
day_trippr said:
Maybe use the SD Card Copier Utility that's bundled with Raspbian?

Cheers!
Click to expand...

Hey - any advice on this? I tried to use the SD Card Copier utility today and kept getting a couple errors. After I initiated the copy, first I'd see a popup that said that the device had been disconnected without ejecting, then right after I get an error that it is unable to create a partition.

I googled, found a few people who asked for help with this, but no resolution. Thoughts?
 
rkhanso said:
Has anyone used CraftbeerPi to control temps on a Kegerator?
I was looking at a kegerator on craigslist and the guy said the controller for it went out. I think he installed an Inkbird controller on it, but said it froze his beer once and he doesn't trust it any longer.
I'm wondering if he may have just programmed it wrong or wired it up wrong.

Thinking about buying this Kegerator for $125 (but it's set up for commercial 16gal kegs, not corny kegs) and am wondering if it's worth the risk or not. I'll have the expense of converting it over to use corny kegs and potential cost of fixing or replacing the temp control for it.
Click to expand...

That's my main usage today. I manage my kegerator and my term chamber. I have yet to build my brew controller and electric system. Works perfectly.
 
I did pick up the used Kegerator. A Danby brand, 5lb CO2 tank (with some gas, not sure how much), 2 regulators, empty 16gal Sanke keg, D-Coupler, single faucet tower, extra beer line, all for $150.
I think the Inkbird controller is working OK, as I used my CraftbeerPi to monitor temps and they fluctuated about 5-6F around the set point consistently for a day. The next time I brew and Keg, I'll put the CraftbeerPi probes in the kegerator to monitor temps and make sure the Inkbird is working OK. If not, I'll just use the CraftbeerPi controller to run the kegerator.

I bought 2 used Pin-lock kegs and fittings/hose/extra o-rings and transfer hose for $100.

So, for maybe around $175 ($250 minus the Sanke keg deposit return and sale of all my old bottling equipment) I'm set up for kegging and dispensing a cold 10 gallons of beer.
 
rkhanso said:
I did pick up the used Kegerator. A Danby brand, 5lb CO2 tank (with some gas, not sure how much), 2 regulators, empty 16gal Sanke keg, D-Coupler, single faucet tower, extra beer line, all for $150.
I think the Inkbird controller is working OK, as I used my CraftbeerPi to monitor temps and they fluctuated about 5-6F around the set point consistently for a day. The next time I brew and Keg, I'll put the CraftbeerPi probes in the kegerator to monitor temps and make sure the Inkbird is working OK. If not, I'll just use the CraftbeerPi controller to run the kegerator.

I bought 2 used Pin-lock kegs and fittings/hose/extra o-rings and transfer hose for $100.

So, for maybe around $175 ($250 minus the Sanke keg deposit return and sale of all my old bottling equipment) I'm set up for kegging and dispensing a cold 10 gallons of beer.
Click to expand...

With the CBP, you can not only manage that power but also report on beer temp, cold plate temp, tower temp.... also you can kick on fans for recirculating or cooling the compressor. With some additional mods, you can read beer flow or weight to manage a tap list with available beer to predict beer outages.

:D
 
Hwk-I-St8 said:
Hey - any advice on this? I tried to use the SD Card Copier utility today and kept getting a couple errors. After I initiated the copy, first I'd see a popup that said that the device had been disconnected without ejecting, then right after I get an error that it is unable to create a partition.

I googled, found a few people who asked for help with this, but no resolution. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Just an update. On a hunch (since others don't seem to be running into this issue) I picked up a different USB adapter for the micro SD and tried again. Everything worked perfectly. I guess the adapter they sent with my pi (from canakit) was flaky.

Too bad I can't get a craftbeerpi interface board. I got an email saying he had some in stock, but when I ordered, it for payment the only option was to be invoiced on paypal. I haven't heard anything since (that was about 2 weeks ago). Now, of course, they don't have any in stock again.

I'm just going to move on with a different option I think.
 
I'm trying to get a new CraftbeerPi setup working to control my Kegerator.
It seems like every time I do this months or years later, I run into problems. Maybe because of the new ways that RaspPi gets installed and new versions of the RaspPi OS?

I've installed Raspberry Pi and CraftbeerPi3. When i go to 192.168.2.251:5000, I get a "connection refused" error. Even when I try from a web browser on the Raspberry Pi itself, I get error - refused to connect.

I can ping the Raspberry Pi from my Windows Desktop, and I can VNC to the Raspberry Pi with no trouble. The CraftbeerPi web page just doesn't load.

Not sure what to do. I did not start over altogether. Maybe I'll try that --- Re-install everything.
 
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The problem is that CraftBeerPi is unmaintained, but Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS and the python libraries it relies on are being updated.

You have to manually intervene to install the outdated versions of libraries. There are various guides around on how to do that.
 
I have a question about the CraftBeerPi KettleController. I see you can set the power level of the heater element. I'm wondering how this works. Is the pi just modulating the duty cycle of the heating element to achieve different power levels? Do you have to have the SSR attached to a PWM pin on the Pi i.e. pin 12? Do you simply use the GPIOPWM actor on the PWM pin? I couldn't really find a definitive explanation of how to set this up.

I'd like to be able to ramp my element power up to 100% to bring to boil and then ramp down afterwards to a level sufficient to keep boil rolling.

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
Hi all - I’m a long time cbpi3 user but I’m completely stuck. CBPI was acting up yesterday to the point where it would no longer reboot. I scrapped the brew day and decided to buy a new SD, and downloaded a fresh raspbian OS. I reinstalled the card into the pi and downloaded a new copy of cbpi 3 successfully. Here’s the kicker. When trying to open cbpi using the Chromium browser, I get the server IP address could not be found error. Any clues to troubleshoot this?
 
May be the instalation do not finish. Check if
Python run.py
Is running, if port 5000 is listening ( netstat -lnpt ).
If not, go to craftbeerpi3 folder and run
sudo ./run.pi
And see the messages
 
Lalo_uy said:
May be the instalation do not finish. Check if
Python run.py
Is running, if port 5000 is listening ( netstat -lnpt ).
If not, go to craftbeerpi3 folder and run
sudo ./run.pi
And see the messages
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info. Run.py is the command to check this?
 
I'm trying to get the GPIOCompressor Add-on working in Craftbeerpi 3. No new items are showing up in the drop-down list in the actors.
All I did was Install the add-on from the Add-on page. Is there anything else that needs to be done to get it to show up in the system settings?
I'm trying to use CraftbeerPi to control a Kegerator, and the temp fluctuations around the transition time from compressor on/off are causing the compressor to cycle quickly.
Thanks.
 
I'm starting a POC build for Node-Red and Fermtrack use, but wondering if there are other promising projects to replace CBP3. I've been using CBP3 for a couple of years with no issue on my Ferment and Keg Mgnt, but just looking for a supported platform.

With CBP4 stalled and no commits for a very long time, and Manuel's lack of responses, what other projects are ones we should be looking at?
 

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