HOWTO - Make a BrewPi Fermentation Controller For Cheap

[day_trippr]

Don't forget that pioneers catch the arrows. The survivability of that probe will be a huge challenge.
The Tilt thing still doesn't look solid enough to bother with - and it's in a lot less hostile environment than the inside of a ceramic grill.

As for the question: I see no advantage using thermowells in fermentors over a properly coupled and insulated external probe, so a floating wireless thermometer doesn't interest me...

Cheers!

 

[wbarber69]

Day got it right again… even though there are very few cases where you can't place a thermowell in the beer. it's perfectly acceptable to just strap it to the side. the temps inside and out are rarely that far off from one another. plus anything you put in the liquid is a potential source of infection. the only reason I have to use a thermowell is because I use heatwrap on my fermenters. if I were doing like a starter and for whatever reason that vessel couldn't have a thermowell in it id be using a chamber setup anyway. although that thing does look pretty slick

 

[Bigdaddyale]

I would use it to measure my mash tempt.I mash in a Rubbermaid cooler and as it is now the lid cant close completely because of the probe wire.

 

[Thorrak]

Meet "The Meater"

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/the-meater-is-a-smart-wireless-meat-thermometer/

Holy crap, that thing looks awesome! Not quite what I would want for a fermenter (48 hour battery life, boo) but perfect for cooking with (Holy crap, a 48 hour battery life!).

Added that to my Amazon wish list, that thing is ****ing sick.

Its products like this that make me love kickstarter.

It looks so good, and they really thought of everything. Measures internal temps and external temps with 1 probe? This thing will make smoking with my Kamado way easier than dealing with my bull**** weber 2 probe thing that needs to be re-sync'd all the god damn time.

Wifi and bluetooth? The "Meater block" acts as a wifi extender?

They seriously thought of everything.

Seriously! My only concern is that it appears to be one of those kickstarters that is running a year behind schedule at the moment despite collecting ~$4MM from Kickstarter/Indiegogo. As soon as they get probes in the hands of backers, I'll be in the market for one.

 

[farmskis]

Can anyone help me to some resources on how to delete old brew files from my brewpi I built? Where are they stored, commands, etc? I use putty to control it. thank you guys!

 

[day_trippr]

Data files are kept in /var/www/brewpi/data or /var/www/html/brewpi/data depending on your installation.
Each run will be in a unique folder, so you can blow the folders away that you don't want to keep...

Cheers!

 

[farmskis]

Data files are kept in /var/www/brewpi/data or /var/www/html/brewpi/data depending on your installation.
Each run will be in a unique folder, so you can blow the folders away that you don't want to keep...

Cheers!

Thank you for the info! Now once I find the folder What is the command to view the folders in the data folder? Is it "ls" or something similar? Then the command to delete the unique brew folders once I view them? Is it "rm"? So if I delete all the folders in the data folder that is what deletes the different brews I have data for?

 

[day_trippr]

'ls' will list the files and folders in the folder of current focus.
'ls <path>' will list the contents of the folder at the end of the path

'rm -r <folder name>' will remove the target folder and everything in it recursively.
If the user you're logged in as doesn't have the privs, elevate the rights by using
'sudo rm -r <folder name>'

Don't wipe out the root folder /var/www/brewpi/data or wherever your logs are stored, just delete the individual run folders.

And look into WinSCP.
It's the bomb for remote file management .
I use it exclusively across my RPi fleet, as I can open simultaneous sessions to multiple machines if I have something I want to distribute from my development system to the rest.
It's much easier to paw around your SD card than using CLI stuff...

Cheers!

 

[farmskis]

'ls' will list the files and folders in the folder of current focus.
'ls <path>' will list the contents of the folder at the end of the path

'rm -r <folder name>' will remove the target folder and everything in it recursively.
If the user you're logged in as doesn't have the privs, elevate the rights by using
'sudo rm -r <folder name>'

Don't wipe out the root folder /var/www/brewpi/data or wherever your logs are stored, just delete the individual run folders.

And look into WinSCP.
It's the bomb for remote file management .
I use it exclusively across my RPi fleet, as I can open simultaneous sessions to multiple machines if I have something I want to distribute from my development system to the rest.
It's much easier to paw around your SD card than using CLI stuff...

Cheers!

Thank you for the file transfer program. I will look into that. It looks much easier to work on that! for now....
I was able to navigate to the data folder and view my brews. When trying to delete the brew folders it asks me to confirm a bunch of write protected Json files. Do I just confirm through all of these to delete the folder? They all have a date associated with them it looks like.

 

[waverz]

I ended up doing some re-wiring and now all is well...we'll almost. I'm not sure if I'm keeping or dumping the Left Hand Milk Stout Clone. I tried a sample and it doesn't taste horrible but it doesn't really taste like it supposed to. Also, for some reason the color is off. It looks more like a porter than a stout.

I'm not sure if the guy at the brew shop messed up on my grain bill or the 80F fermentation temps had something to do with it. I'll give it time and see what happens before I feed it to the driveway.

So this was short lived. Things seemed to be working fine for a few days and then it went nuts again so I stopped using it.

I decided to try replacing the uno as well as the DS18B20's last night. I also installed Jessie and brewpi on a known working SD card. Everything ran fine without any problems while on my bench with nothing connected to the relays.

I hooked it up to the cooler today and now I'm getting errors again. The logs indicate a temp sensor being disconnected but I can assure you they are connected.

I am wondering if I am getting some sort of electrical noise in my DS18B20 wiring. I have 2 sensors that run through the bottom of the cooler all the way to the top of the cooler along with the rest of the wiring for the evaporation fan and florescent light. I may try moving the wiring for the sensors tomorrow to see if that helps. Other than that I am out of ideas.

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[day_trippr]

[...]I was able to navigate to the data folder and view my brews. When trying to delete the brew folders it asks me to confirm a bunch of write protected Json files. Do I just confirm through all of these to delete the folder? They all have a date associated with them it looks like.

Sorry, was out of town for a few days.

Yes, wipe out all the files in the specified folder, and the folder itself for good order.
You can also use:
rm -rf mydir

if you want to skip the confirmations...

Cheers!

 

[day_trippr]

fwiw, all of my ds18b20 probes (well over two dozen of them) have 3 meter long leads. And the ones in my keezer have an additional 5 feet of twisted pairs and ribbon cables between Uno and sensors. Same is true for the five other keezer probes I run on the RPi2B with my temperature logger to track various performance parameters.

Point being you can put a hella bunch of wire on these things and they'll still work reliably, as long as VCC is 5V and you have a 4.7K pull-up to 5V on the data line.

As for noise, if you've seen my "minion" design you know it's a wicked cramped implementation with everything pretty damned close to everything - AC, DC, Bluetooth radio, you name it. No problems there, either...

Cheers!

 

[waverz]

fwiw, all of my ds18b20 probes (well over two dozen of them) have 3 meter long leads. And the ones in my keezer have an additional 5 feet of twisted pairs and ribbon cables between Uno and sensors. Same is true for the five other keezer probes I run on the RPi2B with my temperature logger to track various performance parameters.

Point being you can put a hella bunch of wire on these things and they'll still work reliably, as long as VCC is 5V and you have a 4.7K pull-up to 5V on the data line.

As for noise, if you've seen my "minion" design you know it's a wicked cramped implementation with everything pretty damned close to everything - AC, DC, Bluetooth radio, you name it. No problems there, either...

Cheers!

Fair enough. I did notice I am only getting 4.7v to the vcc rail for the DS18B20's. Maybe it's a "lack of power" issue?

I'm going to try replacing all jumpers from the arduino tomorrow. I'm going to be pissed if I find that it's just a flakey cable.

 

[ame]

I run my sensors at 3.3V with no problems (in the data sheet the range is 3.0 to 5.5V). I have also found that wiring them up doesn't really need a huge amount of care and design.

 

[wbarber69]

It could be the fluorescent light causing noise. what kind of ballast is in there? magnetic, electronic? is it a t8 or t12? Doesn't really matter as any combination can put noise in a line, hell some of the ballasts out there will even leech voltage back into the lines when they go bad.

 

[waverz]

It could be the fluorescent light causing noise. what kind of ballast is in there? magnetic, electronic? is it a t8 or t12? Doesn't really matter as any combination can put noise in a line, hell some of the ballasts out there will even leech voltage back into the lines when they go bad.

The cooler I'm using is an old Master-bilt beverage display cooler with glass door. I'm sure it's probably an old magnetic ballast and I believe the bulb is a 15 watt t8 but would have to double check.

It's a long shot but I wonder if just turning off the light will fix the issue.
I've had the light on the entire time using it as a night light for the garage. I'll turn it off and watch the data logs.

 

[waverz]

It could be the fluorescent light causing noise. what kind of ballast is in there? magnetic, electronic? is it a t8 or t12? Doesn't really matter as any combination can put noise in a line, hell some of the ballasts out there will even leech voltage back into the lines when they go bad.

The cooler I'm using is an old Master-bilt beverage display cooler with glass door. I'm sure it's probably an old magnetic ballast and I believe the bulb is a 15 watt t8 but would have to double check.

It's a long shot but I wonder if just turning off the light will fix the issue.
I've had the light on the entire time using it as a night light for the garage. I'll turn it off and watch the data logs.

 

[atoughram]

Has anyone designed an Arduino Shield for this project yet?

I'm working on the PCB right now and it'll have the shift register for the display, hook ups for the outputs and DS18B20's, and input for an encoder.

I wanted to get rid of the rats nest of wiring on mine.

 

[Mikmonken]

Has anyone designed an Arduino Shield for this project yet?

I'm working on the PCB right now and it'll have the shift register for the display, hook ups for the outputs and DS18B20's, and input for an encoder.

I wanted to get rid of the rats nest of wiring on mine.

Yep Daytrippr has one search there is a thread on here something like brewpi LCD shield or similar

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=510036

Cadibrewer and a few others have knocked up some PCB you can order if you do a quick scan of past posts

 

[stbernts]

You can beg to differ, but you do so by ignoring the reasoning I gave. My reasoning was not solely based on the relative ease but the number of people who exist with firsthand knowledge of implementation who are willing to help.

I have a small vested interest in people thinking Thorrak's solution is easier and well documented, but that does not change the fact that far more people are here helping with the Arduino version than are helping with the Thorrakian (I've given it a name) version.

Remember also that the "true" Arduino code has been tested for probably hundreds of thousands of hours under all manner of conditions. I think Thorrak would agree his is not so thoroughly tested. This will likely always be the case.

Which one do I use? Both.

There are still a lot of questions on the Arduino project as well. Questions which indicates it`s a project in progress still. Some questions get good answers and some don`t. The amount of people who will answer questions will grow in the Thorrakian edition in my opinion. This is the first of the brewpi projects where I did not need help, other than correcting the connection chart. A lot of my friends in Norway now use this edition - I have written a Norwegian article and posted on a forum. Guess this is a good project since none of them hase asked me any questions later on (and yes, I did a good job on the Guide. It`s step by step - and it should be almoust impossible to do errors if one follow it. Hence - no questions asked. But - hell, I`m impressed with ALL the projects here

 

[atoughram]

Yep Daytrippr has one search there is a thread on here something like brewpi LCD shield or similar

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=510036

Cadibrewer and a few others have knocked up some PCB you can order if you do a quick scan of past posts

I'm talking about a custom PCB - Not a protoboard - I've got that already.

 

[atoughram]

Found it - Thanks

 

[waverz]

The cooler I'm using is an old Master-bilt beverage display cooler with glass door. I'm sure it's probably an old magnetic ballast and I believe the bulb is a 15 watt t8 but would have to double check.

It's a long shot but I wonder if just turning off the light will fix the issue.
I've had the light on the entire time using it as a night light for the garage. I'll turn it off and watch the data logs.

I turned off the light this morning. I still get an occasional error in the log about a disconnected temp sensor but they are less frequent. The graph now shows consistent readings even when zoomed in. I'm considering disconnecting the power from the ballast to see if it will help with the log errors.

 

[waverz]

The cooler I'm using is an old Master-bilt beverage display cooler with glass door. I'm sure it's probably an old magnetic ballast and I believe the bulb is a 15 watt t8 but would have to double check.

It's a long shot but I wonder if just turning off the light will fix the issue.
I've had the light on the entire time using it as a night light for the garage. I'll turn it off and watch the data logs.

I turned off the light this morning. I still get an occasional error in the log about a disconnected temp sensor but they are less frequent. The graph now shows consistent readings even when zoomed in. I'm considering disconnecting the power from the ballast to see if it will help with the log errors.

 

[day_trippr]

Has anyone designed an Arduino Shield for this project yet?

I'm working on the PCB right now and it'll have the shift register for the display, hook ups for the outputs and DS18B20's, and input for an encoder.

I wanted to get rid of the rats nest of wiring on mine.

@Cadibrewer laid this out from my schematics and with just a bit of guidance from me. Works great and is hella easier to build than the protoshield version

If you post a request for a pcb or two at the end of this thread, you might catch someone holding extras...

Cheers!

 

[atoughram]

I may have just ordered three custom PCB's, the parts to populate said PCB's, and LCD displays for the Cadibrewer Brewpi V1.1 board. I may need to part with one or two of these populated and tested circuit boards in the near future.

 

[atoughram]

@Cadibrewer laid this out from my schematics and with just a bit of guidance from me. Works great and is hella easier to build than the protoshield version

If you post a request for a pcb or two at the end of this thread, you might catch someone holding extras...

Cheers!

too late... Thanks!

ordered from Oshpark and Mouser...

 

[wbarber69]

I turned off the light this morning. I still get an occasional error in the log about a disconnected temp sensor but they are less frequent. The graph now shows consistent readings even when zoomed in. I'm considering disconnecting the power from the ballast to see if it will help with the log errors.

Or you could repurpose the ballast as a space heater! lol

Btw: when the app says it couldn't post your comment… its lying just hit discard and reload.

 

[Bigdaddyale]

too late... Thanks!

ordered from Oshpark and Mouser...

You can get them cheaper per board at DirtyPCBs
http://dirtypcbs.com/store/user/preview/1124

 

[atoughram]

You can get them cheaper per board at DirtyPCBs
http://dirtypcbs.com/store/user/preview/1124

OSH Park was $25/3 boards

Not sure what dirtypcb would be for three.

OSH Park is local and usually arrives within 10 days or so.