HOWTO - Make a BrewPi Fermentation Controller For Cheap

[user 40839]

The Bluetooth support is a non standard option, so it isn't as smooth as the initial install, but it's pretty straight forward. Follow the instructions in @day_trippr's thread for How To Brewpi Over Bluetooth to program the HC-05 modules. If you've already done that and they are recognized by your Raspberry Pi, no need to do that again. Disconnect the USB and then use the Bluetooth program in the Pi desktop to find and connect to that Bluetooth module. Make sure you check the options to automatically bind. Then make note of the port that it hooks up on. The first one is most likely rfcomm0. Then go to Fermentrack and pull up the device configuration for that controller. Under the serial port option, instead of "auto" you'll use "/dev/rfcomm0" or whatever port you used on the Pi. I can't remember if I checked or unchecked the udev checkbox, so try it both ways if it doesn't work. Do your controllers one at a time and it should work.

Yup, easy peasy. Just went into the Django admin panel, and replaced the ttyACM with rfcomm0 and rfcomm1 respectively.

Only problem - for some reason, the pi isn't keeping the pairing after a reset. I can pair them manually using

sudo rfcomm bind 0 98:D3:34:90:D5:73 1

sudo rfcomm bind 1 98:D3:33:80:E0:6A 1

and previously, adding those to the beginning of the /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart file did the trick. Not now - wonder if it's because of a newer version of Raspbian.

 

[CadiBrewer]

My fridge has evaporator fans/condenser fans that run independently of the thermostat, so rather than plug the fridge into my Brewpi box, I want to bypass the wire to the thermostat. I know how to extend the thermostat wires outside of the fridge and get them to my box, but what is a safe method for using a quick disconnect at my Brewpi box so that I don't have to hardwire the thermostat wires directly into the relay? I've seen the Neutrik stuff, but is there another option that I'm not aware of? Being as though that wire is 110v ac, I'm wanting to be fairly safe

 

[day_trippr]

I fired up one of my ferm fridges for the batch I brewed today and as it was settling in I noticed an aberration I'd seen before and thought I'd document it here.

I pitched this batch around 18:30 and loaded the fridge and fired up the BrewPi minion. It was working the Fridge Temp to get the Beer Temp on target, then the anomaly begins at the first marker - around 21:20. BrewPi is calling for "cold" but the Fridge Temp is drifting towards Room Temp.

Around 21:45 the Fridge Setting makes a sharp rise - due to me resetting the minion while in incipient freak-out mode
If not for that the Fridge Setting would have continued the plateau down in the high 50s.

Finally at 22:30 you see the Fridge Temp start diving.

So, what happened? This 17cf top-freezer fridge has an automatic evaporator defrost function and it kicked in around 21:10. Once the defrost timer expired at 22:30 the compressor was available again and immediately came on-line...

Cheers!

 

[user 40839]

Ooof. See, it's stuff like this that makes me terrified to actually implement BrewPi in a functioning environment. Never mind the fact that I've spent the better part of a year getting it working in the first place.

 

[day_trippr]

Well, yeah, ya gots to take the freakouts in stride (if they resolve favorably it does make that easier )
I had seen this before with this fridge (it's companion doesn't have an auto-defrost and that was the fridge I did nearly all of the fermentations in until now) but it still freaked me enough to cycle the minion.

Where are you at these days with yours? Anything I can help with?

Cheers!

 

[day_trippr]

Man, there's some angry yeast in this weeks batch!
I split 10 gallons of 73 point wort between 1318 and A38 and the two of them are beating up my #2 ferm fridge!

Poor fridge. I knew it well...

Cheers!

 

[CadiBrewer]

Hope you have a blow off tube in there...

 

[day_trippr]

Not my first rodeo

I think the 67°F wort temperature setting seems like it's gonna make it without any blow-off.
I was in a similar situation with the batch on the left last week and dropped to 66°F for a couple of days.
This time I wanted to ride it out...

Cheers!

 

[CadiBrewer]

That's a lot of wort right there!

 

[day_trippr]

Yeah it is
I'm refilling the pipeline after a six month shut-down during a home reno.
I was jonesing something awful all that time and now I have a lot of empty kegs that need filling.
If the gas hardware I ordered for my third fridge shows up in time I'll be brewing again this weekend, otherwise next weekend for sure...

Cheers!

 

[CadiBrewer]

I'm in the same boat. Four months off and I'm out of beer. I'm brewing next weekend and the weekend after to get the kegs on the way to full again. I have three fridges and only commercial beer.

 

[JDL]

I am about to add a LCD Shield to my BrewPi setup, I am going to use a whole new memory card when I do this and just wanted to confirm, if things go bad and I cannot get it working I should be able to just remove the shield and new memory card and put the old one back in and it works as always correct?

Not sure how to do the backups on my computer so figure a whole new memory card is a fail safe as well.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

[day_trippr]

If you create and test boot a clone of your current card you will have a functional parachute if needed.

If you're using Wheezy the best live cloning program I've found is RPI-Clone at https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone.
A single command line

$ sudo rpi-clone sdc -f -v

followed by some confirmations and it's off and running to conclusion (if you don't use the -v verbose switch it will run totally silent until the very end).
Note that the device sdc is system specific - your reader may appear as sda.

If you are using Jessie it comes with an SD backup tool that is easy to use and makes perfect clones. SD Card Copier can be found by digging into the desktop program menu and can be added to the desktop from there. Very easy to use.

I do not know what Stretch comes with if anything, but then I don't know if BrewPi will work on Stretch anyway...

Cheers!

[edit] I found a reference that indicated Stretch comes with the same gui-driven SD Card Copier program as well as the command-line piclone application.

 

[day_trippr]

This one has me scratching my head.
Big ass 107 point imperial stout, pitched Sunday evening, took off before I woke up Monday morning, rocked the casbah right up to 4pm today, when the beer flatlined at target 67°F. And hasn't moved a tenth in three hours.

I'm assuming the beer is producing just enough warmth to hold it there against the 66°F ambient which apparently has the chamber temperature at pretty close to the same. But it still looks weird to have it flatline so quickly considering how active the chamber was right before...

Cheers! ("It's a mystery" )

[edit] fwiw, 3 hours later things got active again. Go figure...

Looking at the Beer curve I suspect the foam insulator over my Beer probe has compressed to where the Fridge temp is having undue influence. Gotta remember to fix that today...

 

[day_trippr]

Minion MK3...now with Reset button

The button restores the symmetry that was disturbed with the MK2 rotary encoder addition. My inner OCD sufferer prefers symmetry.

Cheers!

[edit] In case anyone's wondering...

Minion MK1

Minion MK2

 

[JDL]

Looking really good, reminded me I bought a LCD Screen for my brewpi. There are so many pages at this point was hoping you could point me in the right direction to get my LCD Screen working.

Have all the components listed for the standard brewpi and it currently is functioning. I purchased a Sainsmart LCD2004, here is a amazon link https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0080DYTZQ/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20.

 

[day_trippr]

Well, there's a problem. That version LCD has the I2C "backpack" attached to what otherwise is the same parallel interface the classic BrewPi design expects to "see".
If the backpack can be removed you should be back in business. Also, I'm vaguely remembering someone had hacked a BrewPi firmware build to use the I2C version display, but it would take some digging to find it, and I couldn't help with the implementation very much having no experience with that firmware version.

Amazon is extremely liberal with exchanges/returns/refunds. This is the version display I use on all of my BrewPi implementations...

Cheers!

 

[pocketmon]

BrewPi I2C Version:
https://lukasholenweg.com/2015/03/03/brewpi-i2c-version/

 

[kevink]

My brewpi just crapped out on me in the middle of holding a fridge constant. I noticed that the web interface would no longer work. I restarted it several times and tried three different power supplies, but no luck. The red and green leds on the Arduino stay lit and the red led stays lit on the pi. If I hook it up to a monitor, I see a bunch of stuff that means nothing to me anymore since I built this thing years ago. Does anyone know where I can start poking around?

 

[day_trippr]

I'd start with the "No file system could mount root" bit. Well, actually, the "I/O error on device mmcblk0" stuff, but it's all pointing to a corrupt SD card.

"Got Backup?"

 

[kevink]

Thanks for the reply. Of course I don't have a backup!

I have never deleted any of my brews over the last few years. Are they stored on the SD card? Is it possible that it's too full? Is there any way to test the SD card?

 

[Bigdaddyale]

Bad link- post deleted

 

[day_trippr]

The data for each brew is stored using two formats, .json and csv. You would find them under /home/brewpi/data/<brew name> assuming a vanilla installation. Whether you can mount the sd card on something that understands the file system is the big question now...

Cheers!

 

[DurtyChemist]

New guy with a RPI I'm trying to setup with BrewPi for fermentation. I'll admit I know NOTHING about programming. I'm the guy who buys the parts and needs the simplest explanation and if it doesn't work by copy/paste I'm lost. I installed Raspian using NOOBS and have wifi up and running.

I noticed the php5 has been updated to php7 after trying to do the automated install. I tried going through the manual install using the posted script and got the "test" page when using the "your rpi-ip" page but now I don't know where I'm going wrong. I try running the auto install files but it still tells me php5 is missing. I am pretty sure I installed all 5 python modules and the arduino core. I plugged in all the user scripts as well but I don't see anything like a BrewPi icon I can click on to start the program.

I don't have my arduino or temp probes yet and just wanted to get BrewPi installed because it seemed like it would be an easy thing to do. Any assistance or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[CadiBrewer]

New guy with a RPI I'm trying to setup with BrewPi for fermentation. I'll admit I know NOTHING about programming. I'm the guy who buys the parts and needs the simplest explanation and if it doesn't work by copy/paste I'm lost. I installed Raspian using NOOBS and have wifi up and running.

I noticed the php5 has been updated to php7 after trying to do the automated install. I tried going through the manual install using the posted script and got the "test" page when using the "your rpi-ip" page but now I don't know where I'm going wrong. I try running the auto install files but it still tells me php5 is missing. I am pretty sure I installed all 5 python modules and the arduino core. I plugged in all the user scripts as well but I don't see anything like a BrewPi icon I can click on to start the program.

I don't have my arduino or temp probes yet and just wanted to get BrewPi installed because it seemed like it would be an easy thing to do. Any assistance or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

It's because you're probably on the latest version of Raspbian, which is Stretch. PHP5 doesn't work with Stretch and you'll drive yourself crazy trying to get BrewPi working with PHP7. You've got two solid choices here. One, instead of using NOOBS installer to install Raspbian, go out and download an image file (.img) of Raspbian Jessie and load that onto your SD card instead of Stretch. Then follow the BrewPi setup instructions pretty much as indicated. Or, choice two would be to go to www.fermentrack.com and use Fermentrack instead of BrewPi. Fermentrack is a replacement web interface for BrewPi. It uses the same hardware as BrewPi, so whatever supplies you've purchased will likely work interchangeably. Fermentrack works on Stretch. Given that you're a self-proclaimed Newb, that's the route I'd recommend.

Either way, there are many folks ready to help here to guide you through the process.

 

[Thorrak]

Or, choice two would be to go to www.fermentrack.com and use Fermentrack instead of BrewPi. Fermentrack is a replacement web interface for BrewPi. It uses the same hardware as BrewPi, so whatever supplies you've purchased will likely work interchangeably. Fermentrack works on Stretch. Given that you're a self-proclaimed Newb, that's the route I'd recommend.

Either way, there are many folks ready to help here to guide you through the process.

If you get a weird message (or something other than the Fermentrack website) when you visit there, it's because I'm in the process of migrating fermentrack.com to a new server. Sorry about that.

Full instructions are also available on GitHub and full documentation is available on readthedocs.

 

[DurtyChemist]

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2017-07-05/

Is this the only place to get an img file of Jessie? 1.6 gigs compressed turns into a pretty big file.

Oh and now trying to format my 32 gig memory card I've turned it into 41.6 megabytes. I'm so pissed. I've used every single form of formatting and reformatting I can find and it's still showing up on my laptop as 41.6 mb.

 

[Mikmonken]

Yes Raspbian is pretty big, although if you can downlaod a lite verison if you're OK with command line, which is a bit smaller

in terms of formatting, take a look at https://etcher.io its the formatter recommended by Raspberry Pi org and seems to work well across multiple platforms, so that's worth taking a look.

 

[DurtyChemist]

I got Raspbian reinstalled and went with fermentrack. Since the pi is all I currently own and there is nothing to communicate with I assume that is why nothing comes up when I type the 192.168.x.xx into my browser.

 

[Mikmonken]

No you should get a setup walkthrough when you type in the ipaddress to the web browser, sounds like something has gone wrong during the install, probably better to take a read of the last few pages of this thread. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...no-arduino-needed.586476/page-47#post-8269810 i think there has been a few issues with the install on Jessie, but you should be able to find the answer there.