Fermentrack: Fermentation monitoring & BrewPi-www Replacement for Raspberry Pi

[ChrisThomas]

I've been really messed about with a PSU for my Fermentrack build, which I half started the end of last year. I've placed a total of 6 orders, 3 from Far East 3 from UK, nothing on my doormat yet!

So, in frustration I've used a striped down 2 amp USB charger until I get a "real" PSU. But what do I do for a case in the mean time, what "fun" thing could I do temporarily?



And the back view


Inside there are 4mm plastic panels forming the "case" that everything is mounted on, I haven't mounted anything on the cardboard!

This is just housing the controller, relays and display. The pi is safe with its friends elsewhere.



I've also added some USB ports on the top to power my Brew bubbles!

So when I finally get a real regulated PSU should I bother building a real case? Erm, yes... of course...

 

[troyp42]

If you can upgrade to Buster without too much trouble, I'd definitely say it's worth it. Although I'm going to try to keep Stretch support going as long as possible, there may come a day when I can't -- and an upgrade becomes required. If it's easy enough to upgrade now, I'd recommend it - but if it isn't, that's fine.

Is there a way to back up my fermentrack settings though before upgrading to Buster? I assume I will lose fermentrack and have to reinstall it?

 

[day_trippr]

You shouldn't lose any applications doing an upgrade...

Cheers!

ps: Note: the difference between "Won't" and "Shouldn't" is why we recommend cloning your working card first

 

[troyp42]

You shouldn't lose any applications doing an upgrade...

Cheers!

ps: Note: the difference between "Won't" and "Shouldn't" is why we recommend cloning your working card first

But how do I back up when I can't access the GUI to use sd card copier?

EDIT- I ran this..It appears I already have Buster. I don't know how as I installed this awhile ago now. And I had to update python the other day before updating fermentrack.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release


PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"


NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"


VERSION_ID="10"


VERSION="10 (buster)"


VERSION_CODENAME=buster


ID=raspbian


ID_LIKE=debian


HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"


SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"


BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"

 

[Archy88]

Hello,
Thorrak has been a HUGE help to get me into a mostly functional build. I am so grateful.

I figured I would bring a few questions here so I can stop harassing him plus at least one of the questions might be useful for the masses. Unfortunately, I think at least 50% of my questions going forward will result in "duh" moments. A lot of this is now figuring out how things work and since I am a visual learner it won't really click until I see it happen. I apologize in advance!

1) I have had my controller idle since this afternoon with some new sensors. The sensors are set for beer temp and chamber sensor and are reading accurately. However, I have NO graph depicted for the controller even though I started logging a "test" batch. Any ideas??

2) My fermentation setup is centered around a DIY glycol system. I have an AC cooling a reservoir of glycol which is controlled via an inkbird. I set it 5-10 deg below my fermentation temp and then I'll drop it to the 30's for a cold crash. Inside the reservoir is a pump which circulates the glycol through a coil inside my fermenter. I also have a reptile heating pad on the fermenter to control it in that regard. I mostly figured that Fermentrack would control the pump and the heating pad.
2a) How should I set up my sensors/constants to manage this? Obviously the cooling aspect happens far quicker than the heating. I just really don't know where I should start.
2b) What exactly needs to happen to make glycol support happen? I'm curious in terms of the general picture and what the goal is as well as the source code aspect. I DOUBT I will get very far but I am actually intrigued to see if I can poke around and start connecting some dots.

Again, I'm sure I'll have plenty of follow up questions. I appreciate any assistance that you can provide!

 

[matridium]

I can help with the first question have you tried refreshing the browser page? This is what I do and the graph shows up.
good luck!

Mike

 

[uprightfever]

I've been using Fermentrak very happily for about 2 years now with minimal fuss. Last week I finally clicked on the update from Github banner in hopes that it would fix the "no graph" issue I've been having. I'm not sure it ever updated or did anything positive or negative. I think I changed the "fridge constant" temperature afterwords with no issues. I brewed today and when I went to the web interface i was greeted with the following:

504 Gateway Time-out
nginx/1.10.3

I can ssh in to the raspberry pi and did an apt-get update/upgrade with no improvement.

Some debugging info:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"

some perhaps relevant bits from ~/fermentrak/fermentrak/log/fermentrak-stderr.log

chaussette.util.ImportStringError: import_string() failed for 'fermentrack_django.wsgi:application'. Possible reasons are:

- missing __init__.py in a package;
- package or module path not included in sys.path;
- duplicated package or module name taking precedence in sys.path;
- missing module, class, function or variable;

Debugged import:

- 'fermentrack_django' found in '/home/fermentrack/fermentrack/fermentrack_django/__init__.py'.
- 'fermentrack_django.wsgi' not found.

Original exception:

ImportError: No module named 'sentry_sdk'

Any ideas? I'm eager to get this fixed tonight so my stupidly laborious decoction brewday isn't in vain.

thanks
eric

 

[Bigdaddyale]

I've been using Fermentrak very happily for about 2 years now with minimal fuss. Last week I finally clicked on the update from Github banner in hopes that it would fix the "no graph" issue I've been having. I'm not sure it ever updated or did anything positive or negative. I think I changed the "fridge constant" temperature afterwords with no issues. I brewed today and when I went to the web interface i was greeted with the following:

504 Gateway Time-out
nginx/1.10.3

I can ssh in to the raspberry pi and did an apt-get update/upgrade with no improvement.

Some debugging info:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"

some perhaps relevant bits from ~/fermentrak/fermentrak/log/fermentrak-stderr.log

chaussette.util.ImportStringError: import_string() failed for 'fermentrack_django.wsgi:application'. Possible reasons are:

- missing __init__.py in a package;
- package or module path not included in sys.path;
- duplicated package or module name taking precedence in sys.path;
- missing module, class, function or variable;

Debugged import:

- 'fermentrack_django' found in '/home/fermentrack/fermentrack/fermentrack_django/__init__.py'.
- 'fermentrack_django.wsgi' not found.

Original exception:

ImportError: No module named 'sentry_sdk'

Any ideas? I'm eager to get this fixed tonight so my stupidly laborious decoction brewday isn't in vain.

thanks
eric

There seems to be a problem with stretch and the solution is to load buster

 

[Archy88]

I can help with the first question have you tried refreshing the browser page? This is what I do and the graph shows up.
good luck!

Mike

I wish it were that easy. I did try to refresh but it didn't seem to display. I would assume that enough data has been logged at this point to show a graph. But maybe I have a script issue in the background?

 

[matridium]

Interesting. Are you running the latest build? I updated last week because I realized I was running on a much older version and I kept getting prompted to update. It updated fine and I’m currently logging a stout that is stuck and I can’t get it to restart so today I just switched it to the serving keg to carbonate. I know it might be a pain but I wonder if you reinstall if that will pull the latest version and you can over write what you have? Just an idea that might not be attractive but just might work. You should be able to back up your profiles and import them later. You should be able to back up your past logs too.

 

[Archy88]

Interesting. Are you running the latest build? I updated last week because I realized I was running on a much older version and I kept getting prompted to update. It updated fine and I’m currently logging a stout that is stuck and I can’t get it to restart so today I just switched it to the serving keg to carbonate. I know it might be a pain but I wonder if you reinstall if that will pull the latest version and you can over write what you have? Just an idea that might not be attractive but just might work. You should be able to back up your profiles and import them later. You should be able to back up your past logs too.

That is absolutely a fair idea. I actually have spent the last few days getting my installation (both ubuntu and fermentrack) up to date. I was having some brewpi script issues and Thorrak pushed a quick fix yesterday. So I am current as of that change on the dev branch.

 

[uprightfever]

There seems to be a problem with stretch and the solution is to load buster

I just updated to buster and still no luck.

 

[Archy88]

That is absolutely a fair idea. I actually have spent the last few days getting my installation (both ubuntu and fermentrack) up to date. I was having some brewpi script issues and Thorrak pushed a quick fix yesterday. So I am current as of that change on the dev branch.

I am all set in regards to the graph. I restarted by ubuntu VM and the graph is usable now. I vaguely remembered needing to delete cookies last time this happened and that didn't fix the issue. Figured the server just needed to be refreshed this time.
Thank you for the suggestions to fix this.

Still interested in feedback on the glycol questions

 

[Archy88]

I just updated to buster and still no luck.

Have you tried the fix environment script? Really a shot in the dark from me.

Are you able to test your controller and configure sensors/pins? I was having an issue where the brewpi script wasn't running due to a problem connecting to <controllername>.local. I spent a whole day doing apt-update/upgrade (apparently my ubuntu vm was really out of date) and then I was able to install a special name resolution package referenced way earlier in these threads. Either way, this was blocking me from doing anything controller related.

Weird that we both had no graph issues. Clearly if you did a whole OS fix then my solution of restarting the server won't help you. Hopefully the fix environment script will.

In your errors I see you pointed out ImportError: No module named 'sentry_sdk'..
I too had an import error regarding module named "serial" in relation to the "brewpi.py" script.
...The fix for this was to ensure that I was trying to execute the script via the virtual environment (where all the python packages live)

From searching github I see that that package is used in two locations...

fermentrack_django/settings.py

gravity/tilt/tilt_monitor_aio.py

Clearly your error is coming from django due to the init.py error. Since your stderr says you are missing a module I really think you might have the same issue as me. From your root fermentrack directory you should see a venv directory.
Run $ source venv/bin/activate
This will put you into the virtual environment. Navigate to that init.py directory and run $ python3 __init__.py

See if that shines any light. The virtual environment seems the most likely issue. The fix environment might be an alternative. I'm still not really sure how the whole sequence works. Such that your PI (or my VM in this case) boots up...the virtual environment is activated...and then fermentrack is started. ****I take that back. Github search is proving useful this morning. Looks like this is handled via a chron job which is what my suspicion was. Hope you make some progress so that you can get this brew in order!

 

[matridium]

I’m interested in how your using an AC to cool your glycol.
on your stup do you hav the glycol pump Switching controlled by fermentrack?
the heat pad is that strapped to the outside of the fermenter? I’m trying to get a visual of you setup.

 

[matridium]

Have you tried the fix environment script? Really a shot in the dark from me.

Are you able to test your controller and configure sensors/pins? I was having an issue where the brewpi script wasn't running due to a problem connecting to <controllername>.local. I spent a whole day doing apt-update/upgrade (apparently my ubuntu vm was really out of date) and then I was able to install a special name resolution package referenced way earlier in these threads. Either way, this was blocking me from doing anything controller related.

Weird that we both had no graph issues. Clearly if you did a whole OS fix then my solution of restarting the server won't help you. Hopefully the fix environment script will. I looked through your error statements and I don't think I know enough to point you towards a specific fix.

I am all set in regards to the graph. I restarted by ubuntu VM and the graph is usable now. I vaguely remembered needing to delete cookies last time this happened and that didn't fix the issue. Figured the server just needed to be refreshed this time.
Thank you for the suggestions to fix this.

Still interested in feedback on the glycol questions

Forgot to ask. Have you tried to run a test wih a beer constant using your glycol setup? Just set up table sugar and bread yeast and run an experiment and take a look at the graph to see how the system cycles. How much drift in temperature you have before the controller switches on and off the rig you have. I think once you have some data to look at you can better judge what the tolerance to set you sensors to. I find for my setup the default works well. Beer does not drift too much, I’ve seen slow rises in temp in the early parts of fermentation but I’ve concluded this is my setup not the controller settings. My little refrigerator/ incubator is not ideal. But it appears the settings I have really keeps the beer in the zone of about 1 degree F.

 

[Archy88]

Forgot to ask. Have you tried to run a test wih a beer constant using your glycol setup? Just set up table sugar and bread yeast and run an experiment and take a look at the graph to see how the system cycles. How much drift in temperature you have before the controller switches on and off the rig you have. I think once you have some data to look at you can better judge what the tolerance to set you sensors to. I find for my setup the default works well. Beer does not drift too much, I’ve seen slow rises in temp in the early parts of fermentation but I’ve concluded this is my setup not the controller settings. My little refrigerator/ incubator is not ideal. But it appears the settings I have really keeps the beer in the zone of about 1 degree F.

Hello, here is a 5 am - no coffee - paint visual for you lol

The heating pad sits between a neoprene jacket and the fermenter itself. It is trigged with a call for heat. Inside the glycol reservoir (an old coleman cooler) lives a pump that should be be triggered with a call for cool. The pump will cycle glycol into a stainless coil within the fermenter and then return to the reservoir. The static AC temp is currently an independent inkbird (ideally I would like to tie this to fermentrack too) which should just be set cold enough so that my AC doesn't constantly cycle during fermentation or a cold crash.

I like your idea of a test. Most likely this will actually be a hard cider. If things fail, at least I still have juice
Right now I have fermentrack set to have a beer sensor and a chamber sensor. Without a question I understand that I need to use the beer sensor in the thermowell of the fermenter. The next part is the tricky part..
Technically the chamber sensor should reside in the glycol reservoir. However, the reservoir will always be colder than the fermentation. I imagine the typical "chamber" is much, much closer to the temperature of the fermentation...which is how the fermentation is controlled. I took a look at the control constants in Fermentrack and these values currently don't mean much to me. I will have to do more research to see how they are derived. But what I'm guessing is that I should use the chamber sensor within the glycol reservoir, do a test batch (even if it is water to start) and see how much I fluctuate. From there, start messing with the constants.

Typical fermentation should rise in the first few days and it is healthy to help keep those slightly warmer temps. During the rest of fermentation, my heating pad seems to struggle but I have very little data to back this up other than the fact that my setup lives in a garage in New England. Obviously my cooling will be very quick since the differential and the volume of glycol that I can move is much greater in comparison to the small heating pad.



If those assumptions are correct, that more or less lines up with what I was expecting. The remaining curiosity is likely for Thorrak to see what his goals are for actually making this all work natively with glycol. I'm not sure if this is simply a profile with new constants or a different algorithm entirely.


I think this post might point me in the right direction. But first, why do I always find neat looking alternatives after I finish a project LOL.
brewpi.com
brewblox.netlify.app
Still need to connect the dots between their discussion and the current state of fermentrack. Oh and I sure hope Thorrak can steal some of those cool widgets

 

[Archy88]

Here is my glycol system running over the past few hours with 5.5 gal of water in the fermenter. The heating pad of the fermenter is connected to the heating relay. The pump in the reservoir is connected to the cooling relay.
I am using beer constant profile at 67F.
I have the glycol reservoir set to 55F via an external inkbird.

The beer sensor is in the fermenter thermowell. The fridge sensor is submerged in the glycol.

There is no control of the glycol temp allowed from Fermentrack right now. It doesn't seem like the fridge cycling is doing a whole lot of good but same token temps seem somewhat stable.

Any thoughts??

Also, is there a place that I can view detailed information about what I am actually looking at in terms of the graphs and the various constants? I see the constants have a tooltip but I figure there might be some documentation that I am missing.

I'll let this go until tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully that is enough data for us to analyze. Thank you all!

 

[Bigdaddyale]

I just updated to buster and still no luck.

I'm sure I saw this problem and the solution in this thread might be more hoops to jump through than just downloading buster. look back a few pages or do a search.

 

[Archy88]

The more I look into it the more I'm curious if Fermentrack will ever pick up the new redesign features that will be coming out from Brewpi/Brewblox. The visual depiction is pretty sweet. But not sure where the line gets drawn for us since we are just using the firmware.

 

[day_trippr]

What firmware?
BrewBlox is Spark-oriented and apparently doesn't support Arduinos or ESPs. So I don't see any firmware commonality there.
Pretty sure all of the BrewPi-derived projects supported on HBT came from the original 0.2.10 Arduino BrewPi firmware.
As for the pretty gui, well, I'm not going to speak for @Thorrak of course but that's a huge lift imo...

Cheers!

 

[garzlok]

Like post 1325, I started a new brew today and the graph wouldn’t start. I rebooted my RPi and the graph started up.

i tried changing my log interval, and this old friend is back.

Edit: concerning graphing. When I bound my tilt to my chamber, I had to start a new graph. (Forgot that that action stops the graph) Started a new graph while in Fridge Constant. Like last night, the graph didn’t start and was a blank space. Since I just pitched my yeast, I changed the chamber to be controlled by a ferm profile. The graph now displays, but after 10 minutes, no data points are displayed in the graph. (In the Tilt dashboard, Temp and Gravity data points are displayed correctly). A reboot of the RPi is needed to get the Chamber graph to work and all the data points became present.

 

[Albie1200]

Please forgive me as I know very little programming and was actually amazed I got Fermentrack to work in the first place. I installed everything about a year or so ago. Everything has been working great. I was even able to perform that update that took 2 steps a month or two ago. I brewed today and had Fermentrack on all day. I got the beer in the fermentation chiller, started a new beer log and set the beer profile. Everything working great. Then I changed out the spectrum router for a Linksys, came down to the garage and I could no longer get into fermentrack. I tried from the Pi, laptop and phone. Entering 192.168.1.71 no longer opens fermentrack? I reconnected the old router and still same issue. I reinstalled Fermentrack, and did the Python 3.7 install and still get: This site isn't reachable ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE. Fortunately, I hear the chiller turning on periodically so thankfully I think the beer temp is ok. Did something change in accessing Fermentrack?

 

[Archy88]

Please forgive me as I know very little programming and was actually amazed I got Fermentrack to work in the first place. I installed everything about a year or so ago. Everything has been working great. I was even able to perform that update that took 2 steps a month or two ago. I brewed today and had Fermentrack on all day. I got the beer in the fermentation chiller, started a new beer log and set the beer profile. Everything working great. Then I changed out the spectrum router for a Linksys, came down to the garage and I could no longer get into fermentrack. I tried from the Pi, laptop and phone. Entering 192.168.1.71 no longer opens fermentrack? I reconnected the old router and still same issue. I reinstalled Fermentrack, and did the Python 3.7 install and still get: This site isn't reachable ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE. Fortunately, I hear the chiller turning on periodically so thankfully I think the beer temp is ok. Did something change in accessing Fermentrack?

You said you tried from the pi which means you still have access to ssh to it.
You can access the logs of fermentrack from your pi command line and see if your error messages are telling you anything.

My thought is that the IP on your new router has been automatically assigned to something else. But if you can connect to the pi then that might not be true. Whether or not you had the IP functional on the old router it makes me believe that you did not assign the IP as a static one. Thus, when you reconnected it you probably gave fermentrack a new IP. But again, you can connect to the pi so that again makes me doubt my thought.

Definitely look to see if you can access the logs for an indicator of what is wrong.

 

[Thorrak]

I've been using Fermentrak very happily for about 2 years now with minimal fuss. Last week I finally clicked on the update from Github banner in hopes that it would fix the "no graph" issue I've been having. I'm not sure it ever updated or did anything positive or negative. I think I changed the "fridge constant" temperature afterwords with no issues. I brewed today and when I went to the web interface i was greeted with the following:

504 Gateway Time-out
nginx/1.10.3

I can ssh in to the raspberry pi and did an apt-get update/upgrade with no improvement.

Some debugging info:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"

some perhaps relevant bits from ~/fermentrak/fermentrak/log/fermentrak-stderr.log

chaussette.util.ImportStringError: import_string() failed for 'fermentrack_django.wsgi:application'. Possible reasons are:

- missing __init__.py in a package;
- package or module path not included in sys.path;
- duplicated package or module name taking precedence in sys.path;
- missing module, class, function or variable;

Debugged import:

- 'fermentrack_django' found in '/home/fermentrack/fermentrack/fermentrack_django/__init__.py'.
- 'fermentrack_django.wsgi' not found.

Original exception:

ImportError: No module named 'sentry_sdk'

Any ideas? I'm eager to get this fixed tonight so my stupidly laborious decoction brewday isn't in vain.

thanks
eric

I just updated to buster and still no luck.

That's odd - how did you "update" to buster?

That said, the fix is the "fix environment" script. More information (and how to run the script) is here: Django 3.0 upgrade cannot be completed automatically on Raspbian Stretch · Issue #463 · thorrak/fermentrack

 

[Thorrak]

The more I look into it the more I'm curious if Fermentrack will ever pick up the new redesign features that will be coming out from Brewpi/Brewblox. The visual depiction is pretty sweet. But not sure where the line gets drawn for us since we are just using the firmware.

Nope - not in the cards. Fermentrack should support most Brewblox controllers (I think?) but that's about where the similarities end. Fermentrack is a complete ground-up replacement for the BrewPi web interface which eventually became Brewblox.

 

[Thorrak]

Please forgive me as I know very little programming and was actually amazed I got Fermentrack to work in the first place. I installed everything about a year or so ago. Everything has been working great. I was even able to perform that update that took 2 steps a month or two ago. I brewed today and had Fermentrack on all day. I got the beer in the fermentation chiller, started a new beer log and set the beer profile. Everything working great. Then I changed out the spectrum router for a Linksys, came down to the garage and I could no longer get into fermentrack. I tried from the Pi, laptop and phone. Entering 192.168.1.71 no longer opens fermentrack? I reconnected the old router and still same issue. I reinstalled Fermentrack, and did the Python 3.7 install and still get: This site isn't reachable ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE. Fortunately, I hear the chiller turning on periodically so thankfully I think the beer temp is ok. Did something change in accessing Fermentrack?

If you change your router, then the IP addresses/subnets/etc. all likely changed as well. You mentioned that you "tried from the Pi" - What exactly did you do on the pi? Load up a web browser and navigate to 192.168.1.71?

Are you sure your Pi is properly connecting to your new WiFi network? You need to figure out what the IP address is for your raspberry pi now that you've upgraded (the mDNS address may still work - http://raspberrypi.local/ if you haven't changed it) so long as the Pi has been restarted since connected to the new network

 

[Thorrak]

Like post 1325, I started a new brew today and the graph wouldn’t start. I rebooted my RPi and the graph started up.

i tried changing my log interval, and this old friend is back.

View attachment 685932

Edit: concerning graphing. When I bound my tilt to my chamber, I had to start a new graph. (Forgot that that action stops the graph) Started a new graph while in Fridge Constant. Like last night, the graph didn’t start and was a blank space. Since I just pitched my yeast, I changed the chamber to be controlled by a ferm profile. The graph now displays, but after 10 minutes, no data points are displayed in the graph. (In the Tilt dashboard, Temp and Gravity data points are displayed correctly). A reboot of the RPi is needed to get the Chamber graph to work and all the data points became present.

...boooooo.

That's a bug which I thought had been handily squished. I'm not near my Fermentrack builds at the moment so it will be difficult to do anything about until next weekend, unfortunately.

 

[Albie1200]

You said you tried from the pi which means you still have access to ssh to it.
You can access the logs of fermentrack from your pi command line and see if your error messages are telling you anything.

My thought is that the IP on your new router has been automatically assigned to something else. But if you can connect to the pi then that might not be true. Whether or not you had the IP functional on the old router it makes me believe that you did not assign the IP as a static one. Thus, when you reconnected it you probably gave fermentrack a new IP. But again, you can connect to the pi so that again makes me doubt my thought.

Definitely look to see if you can access the logs for an indicator of what is wrong.

First, thank you for helping me out, as I said I am ok on most technical things, but some of this is getting over my head.

When I said I can connect to the pi, it's because I am connecting a hdmi, keyboard and mouse directly to the pi (Yes, I know that little about the pi). If it helps, I can see the pi on the linksys app on the network map. I have tried connecting the pi via ethernet cable (original method) and wifi (with the new router). I am currently connected via network cable to the new router.

If you change your router, then the IP addresses/subnets/etc. all likely changed as well. You mentioned that you "tried from the Pi" - What exactly did you do on the pi? Load up a web browser and navigate to 192.168.1.71?

Are you sure your Pi is properly connecting to your new WiFi network? You need to figure out what the IP address is for your raspberry pi now that you've upgraded (the mDNS address may still work - http://raspberrypi.local/ if you haven't changed it) so long as the Pi has been restarted since connected to the new network

As stated above, I connect to pi with a hdmi, keyboard and mouse then tried 192.168.1.71 and get nothing. I just tried using the http://raspberrypi.local/ (except changed name of my pi) and Fermentrack opened! So that's awesome, but it looks like I compounded my problem last night in my uneducated effort to "fix" things.

So when everything went crazy last night, I was worried about the chiller not being controlled so I reinstalled Fermentrack. When I used the address you just gave me Fermentrack opened, but it's guiding me to start the first time configuration. I have noticed that the chiller is turning on periodically and can verify on the tilt that the temp is right. I am assuming the ESP8266 is still operating off the last instructions it received? If I go through configuration will I lose all my saved ferm profiles and logs?

If I will lose everything, should I just leave everything alone and let the beer go, and then when it's done do a fresh install of Buster (my pi is still on Stretch) and Fermentrack?

Thank you so much for all your help! I would be dead in the water otherwise. Whatever direction I go, I will be learning how to the use pi better when this beer is done.

 

[Archy88]

So when everything went crazy last night, I was worried about the chiller not being controlled so I reinstalled Fermentrack. When I used the address you just gave me Fermentrack opened, but it's guiding me to start the first time configuration. I have noticed that the chiller is turning on periodically and can verify on the tilt that the temp is right. I am assuming the ESP8266 is still operating off the last instructions it received? If I go through configuration will I lose all my saved ferm profiles and logs?

If I will lose everything, should I just leave everything alone and let the beer go, and then when it's done do a fresh install of Buster (my pi is still on Stretch) and Fermentrack?

So you should have the controller near the fermenter. You then have the fermentrack instance on your pi, wherever that might be in your house. From my understanding, the controller is able to store it's own logging internally. When fermentrack looks to update your graph it should be retrieving that FROM the controller. I'm not sure if it does a total copy of the log or if it just reads it quick.
Either way, once you program your controller to go off and do its thing...it really should be a standalone unit. That is until Fermentrack needs to receive updates from it OR you change something about a control mode or a constant.

Therefore, I think you should absolutely leave it alone.

I'm not sure where the ferm profiles are saved (server side or controller side. I'm assuming controller side.) but you can do no harm by letting it finish out. I BELIEVE you probably could reinstall fermentrack and let it reconnect to the controller which has its own firmware version, logging, profiles etc...but as long as you are happy with the profile that is likely functional I wouldn't mess with it.

 

[Archy88]

My initial 5.5 gal water test of Fermentrack controlling a glycol system is complete. I stopped the static control of my glycol reservoir and turned off all controller profiles at around 9pm EST last night (6/21). I will post the updated screenshot at the bottom of this message. After using the system over the weekend and getting a reply from Thorrak I now understand a bit more about how it is all working.

The biggest thing to understand is what Fermentrack thinks is my "fridge" is actually a combo of: a pump sitting in a glycol reservoir and a heating pad wrapped on the fermenter.

I think some of the initial calls for heat (85F ) are alarming but things seemed to even out after that. We do have to keep in mind that I totally expect heating to be relatively slow with the heating pad that I am using. While cooling should be very quick since I had a 10F differential between set beer temp and set glycol temp.

From my uneducated viewpoint, I can't really determine if what I am seeing is good or bad. It seems that the cooling periods were longer and less frequent. While the heating happened in quicker more frequent blasts. It honestly seems opposite of what I was expecting.

BUT it looks like my beer temp held pretty steady. There was a 2.5F differential between beer temp and beer setting just before that big 85F spike. Otherwise temps remained +/- 1.5F.

I think I will order a third sensor to see what room temp looks like. I am operating in an unconditioned garage so I will be curious to see how ambient temp matters here in New England. The only protection I have is a pink foam chamber that I built around my fermenter but by no means is it airtight.

I would LOVE your thoughts/opinions tips regarding my data. Mostly because I have no clue how to proceed

 

[garzlok]

I would LOVE your thoughts/opinions tips regarding my data. Mostly because I have no clue how to proceed
View attachment 686155

For Temp control, the data points that have the most relevance belong to the Beer Temp. Your Beer Temp never spikes, just your Fridge Setting.

Personally, I wouldn’t get too caught-up in the call for heat, the call for cool, the PID settings, etc, if your controller is holding temp as desired. (now if your Beer Temp has unknown wild swings, yes, tweaking would be necessary)

 

[Thorrak]

So you should have the controller near the fermenter. You then have the fermentrack instance on your pi, wherever that might be in your house. From my understanding, the controller is able to store it's own logging internally. When fermentrack looks to update your graph it should be retrieving that FROM the controller. I'm not sure if it does a total copy of the log or if it just reads it quick.
Either way, once you program your controller to go off and do its thing...it really should be a standalone unit. That is until Fermentrack needs to receive updates from it OR you change something about a control mode or a constant.

Therefore, I think you should absolutely leave it alone.

I'm not sure where the ferm profiles are saved (server side or controller side. I'm assuming controller side.) but you can do no harm by letting it finish out. I BELIEVE you probably could reinstall fermentrack and let it reconnect to the controller which has its own firmware version, logging, profiles etc...but as long as you are happy with the profile that is likely functional I wouldn't mess with it.

This is unfortunately not quite how the controllers work. The controllers have the current set points stored on them - but that's it. If your controller currently has a beer profile active, and that beer profile most recently called for the beer set point to be 42 F, then that's all your controller will know about. That is: It will not know where in the profile it currently is, it will not know where it has been, and it will not know where it is going. It relies on BrewPi-Script (and the profiles the script loads from Fermentrack) to know where it is going.

Similarly, your controller doesn't itself record any temperature readings. The controller reports temperature readings back to Fermentrack as it takes them, and the logging is up to Fermentrack.

If Fermentrack dies mid-profile, the controller will just keep your fermenter held at whatever the last received set point is. If that's in the middle of a cold crash, it will stop wherever in that cold crash it happened to be.

 

[Thorrak]

My initial 5.5 gal water test of Fermentrack controlling a glycol system is complete. I stopped the static control of my glycol reservoir and turned off all controller profiles at around 9pm EST last night (6/21). I will post the updated screenshot at the bottom of this message. After using the system over the weekend and getting a reply from Thorrak I now understand a bit more about how it is all working.

The biggest thing to understand is what Fermentrack thinks is my "fridge" is actually a combo of: a pump sitting in a glycol reservoir and a heating pad wrapped on the fermenter.

I think some of the initial calls for heat (85F ) are alarming but things seemed to even out after that. We do have to keep in mind that I totally expect heating to be relatively slow with the heating pad that I am using. While cooling should be very quick since I had a 10F differential between set beer temp and set glycol temp.

From my uneducated viewpoint, I can't really determine if what I am seeing is good or bad. It seems that the cooling periods were longer and less frequent. While the heating happened in quicker more frequent blasts. It honestly seems opposite of what I was expecting.

BUT it looks like my beer temp held pretty steady. There was a 2.5F differential between beer temp and beer setting just before that big 85F spike. Otherwise temps remained +/- 1.5F.

I think I will order a third sensor to see what room temp looks like. I am operating in an unconditioned garage so I will be curious to see how ambient temp matters here in New England. The only protection I have is a pink foam chamber that I built around my fermenter but by no means is it airtight.

I would LOVE your thoughts/opinions tips regarding my data. Mostly because I have no clue how to proceed
View attachment 686155

For glycol, you don't want the fridge temp/beer temp interaction that most BrewPis have. You only want a single sensor to be active - in this case, the "fridge" sensor - which should actually be reading your beer temp.

The thing that I'm most curious about is why it seems like there are long stretches during which your controller is calling for cool where the temperature isn't dropping relative to how quickly it looks like it ramps up. For most "chamber" builds I'd not be shocked - that's a big part of why the BrewPi controllers are needed, after all - but for glycol I would expect the temperature to start dropping rather quickly given that you are cooling the beer directly, when at a high enough temperature that you should get good convection of the beer within your fermenter. How close is your temperature probe to your circulation coil?

 

[Albie1200]

This is unfortunately not quite how the controllers work. The controllers have the current set points stored on them - but that's it. If your controller currently has a beer profile active, and that beer profile most recently called for the beer set point to be 42 F, then that's all your controller will know about. That is: It will not know where in the profile it currently is, it will not know where it has been, and it will not know where it is going. It relies on BrewPi-Script (and the profiles the script loads from Fermentrack) to know where it is going.

Similarly, your controller doesn't itself record any temperature readings. The controller reports temperature readings back to Fermentrack as it takes them, and the logging is up to Fermentrack.

If Fermentrack dies mid-profile, the controller will just keep your fermenter held at whatever the last received set point is. If that's in the middle of a cold crash, it will stop wherever in that cold crash it happened to be.

Thank you Thorrak and Archy88 for the help. I think I am slowly getting the concepts in my head. While my Ferm Profile for WLP001 starts at 66, holds for 2 days and then starts ramping up 1* per day, everything went haywire during day 1 @ 66*. So it won't ramp up, but I can live with that for this beer (like fermenting in the old days with a inkbird). Once this beer is complete, I plan on spending some time actually learning the proper way to use the pi and then do a fresh install of Buster and Fermentrack.

Thank you again for all your help. This experience has made me feel like my Grandparents!

 

[Archy88]

For glycol, you don't want the fridge temp/beer temp interaction that most BrewPis have. You only want a single sensor to be active - in this case, the "fridge" sensor - which should actually be reading your beer temp.

The thing that I'm most curious about is why it seems like there are long stretches during which your controller is calling for cool where the temperature isn't dropping relative to how quickly it looks like it ramps up. For most "chamber" builds I'd not be shocked - that's a big part of why the BrewPi controllers are needed, after all - but for glycol I would expect the temperature to start dropping rather quickly given that you are cooling the beer directly, when at a high enough temperature that you should get good convection of the beer within your fermenter. How close is your temperature probe to your circulation coil?

My thermowell is relatively close to the circulation coil, roughly within an inch. However, my soldered probe still had a hard time fully fitting into the thermowell. It was only inserted about 25%, I should have added that disclaimer. I would still hope that it is accurate enough but I truly don't know.

Worth noting again that the glycol temp was at 57 compared to the beer setting of 67. Again, I would have thought it was a big enough difference but maybe not. The fridge sensor was always seeing the 57 deg glycol and the beer sensor was always seeing 67.

 

[Archy88]

This is unfortunately not quite how the controllers work. The controllers have the current set points stored on them - but that's it. If your controller currently has a beer profile active, and that beer profile most recently called for the beer set point to be 42 F, then that's all your controller will know about. That is: It will not know where in the profile it currently is, it will not know where it has been, and it will not know where it is going. It relies on BrewPi-Script (and the profiles the script loads from Fermentrack) to know where it is going.

Similarly, your controller doesn't itself record any temperature readings. The controller reports temperature readings back to Fermentrack as it takes them, and the logging is up to Fermentrack.

If Fermentrack dies mid-profile, the controller will just keep your fermenter held at whatever the last received set point is. If that's in the middle of a cold crash, it will stop wherever in that cold crash it happened to be.

Thank you for the clarification. That sequence makes perfect sense and now I also know for myself to be careful!

 

[Archy88]

This is going to be an insanely dumb question. But I found that you can zoom around the graph on an iphone. I can't seem to do so from Chrome. Is this user error or can we not manipulate from a desktop browser?

After speaking with Thorrak, I have kicked off another glycol test. This time my fridge sensor is actually inside my fermenter. I'll post the results of ~20-24 hours tomorrow.

 

[Thorrak]

This is going to be an insanely dumb question. But I found that you can zoom around the graph on an iphone. I can't seem to do so from Chrome. Is this user error or can we not manipulate from a desktop browser?

After speaking with Thorrak, I have kicked off another glycol test. This time my fridge sensor is actually inside my fermenter. I'll post the results of ~20-24 hours tomorrow.

You should be able to - just click and drag.

 

[Archy88]

You should be able to - just click and drag.

I'll see myself out now.

...it totally was not doing that before