HOWTO - Make a BrewPi Fermentation Controller For Cheap

[LBussy]

And ... I found it. Of course, after I took the time to post here. Here's my answer:

https://bugs.python.org/issue512981

So I came up with this kludge:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
saved_stdin = sys.stdin
sys.stdin = open('/dev/tty', 'r')
name= raw_input('What is your name?: ')
sys.stdout.write('Hello, ' + name + '.\n')
sys.stdin = saved_stdin

That was ... well, I don't want to tell you how long I spent on that.

 

[kaljade]

And ... I found it. Of course, after I took the time to post here. Here's my answer:

https://bugs.python.org/issue512981

So I came up with this kludge:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
saved_stdin = sys.stdin
sys.stdin = open('/dev/tty', 'r')
name= raw_input('What is your name?: ')
sys.stdout.write('Hello, ' + name + '.\n')
sys.stdin = saved_stdin

That was ... well, I don't want to tell you how long I spent on that.

On the upside, you just earned yourself a (virtual) beer ;-)

Cheers,

Kal

 

[LBussy]

So I do have that going for me ...

 

[meatballosaurus]

It seems like I've been searching the web for days (here, the BrewPi forums, Reddit) and can't seem to find a good answer to my situation. I've found lots of bits and pieces, but nothing with a decisive conclusion. I'm just getting back into homebrewing after losing 95% of my equipment to a housefire about a year ago. One of the few things I was actually able to salvage was my legacy BrewPi setup (based on rpi+arduino).

For my new setup I've decided to go with a SS Brewtech Chronical BME and am planning on chilling it with a cooled glycol reservoir and heat with a heater wrap on the conical. I also have an inkbird controller so I was going to use that to hold the glycol to a set temp and wanted to use the BrewPi to control a pump that circulated the glycol through the conical chiller.

It seems people have gotten somewhat acceptable results using the chamber TC in the conical thermowell and using the fridge constant mode, but there are several caveats such as not being able to run a profile or requiring to control the glycol to just under the beer setpoint to avoid cooling spikes. I'm already way over budget and can't really afford to upgrade to the new BrewPi Spark or rebuild to a different controller. I guess I'm looking for recommendations given my situation. Here's some ideas/questions based on where I'm at now:

• resolve to just using fridge constant mode (simplest, but not ideal given the above caveats)
  
  
• Switch over to Fermentrack. This seems like it would be pretty simple for me, I just haven't been able to find a find any documentation on someone actually getting this to work with a glycol chiller any better than the standard BrewPi install although it may be easier if I want to update to the latest OS on the Pi. If someone knows of documentation out there, please point me in the direction.
  
  
• Switch to BrewPiLess. Honestly, I really don't know much about this other than it seems like it has glycol chiller control functionality. It seems like I'd be tossing half of my current setup to switch and would be some amount of labor but not that expensive?
  
  
• Just use the Inkbird controller (not my preferred way at all).
  
  
• Build a DIY BrewPi Spark. I've seen some tutorials, but honestly this looks like more work than I'd like to do right now (I really just want to get back to brewing) and might be a little on the expensive side and overkill for just doing fermentation control.
  
  
• Any other suggestions?
  

The amount of information and support from so many individuals available on these forums is just incredible. I really appreciate any input, opinions, and help/suggestions.

 

[kaljade]

It seems like I've been searching the web for days (here, the BrewPi forums, Reddit) and can't seem to find a good answer to my situation. I've found lots of bits and pieces, but nothing with a decisive conclusion. I'm just getting back into homebrewing after losing 95% of my equipment to a housefire about a year ago. One of the few things I was actually able to salvage was my legacy BrewPi setup (based on rpi+arduino).

For my new setup I've decided to go with a SS Brewtech Chronical BME and am planning on chilling it with a cooled glycol reservoir and heat with a heater wrap on the conical. I also have an inkbird controller so I was going to use that to hold the glycol to a set temp and wanted to use the BrewPi to control a pump that circulated the glycol through the conical chiller.

It seems people have gotten somewhat acceptable results using the chamber TC in the conical thermowell and using the fridge constant mode, but there are several caveats such as not being able to run a profile or requiring to control the glycol to just under the beer setpoint to avoid cooling spikes. I'm already way over budget and can't really afford to upgrade to the new BrewPi Spark or rebuild to a different controller. I guess I'm looking for recommendations given my situation. Here's some ideas/questions based on where I'm at now:

• resolve to just using fridge constant mode (simplest, but not ideal given the above caveats)
  
  
• Switch over to Fermentrack. This seems like it would be pretty simple for me, I just haven't been able to find a find any documentation on someone actually getting this to work with a glycol chiller any better than the standard BrewPi install although it may be easier if I want to update to the latest OS on the Pi. If someone knows of documentation out there, please point me in the direction.
  
  
• Switch to BrewPiLess. Honestly, I really don't know much about this other than it seems like it has glycol chiller control functionality. It seems like I'd be tossing half of my current setup to switch and would be some amount of labor but not that expensive?
  
  
• Just use the Inkbird controller (not my preferred way at all).
  
  
• Build a DIY BrewPi Spark. I've seen some tutorials, but honestly this looks like more work than I'd like to do right now (I really just want to get back to brewing) and might be a little on the expensive side and overkill for just doing fermentation control.
  
  
• Any other suggestions?
  

The amount of information and support from so many individuals available on these forums is just incredible. I really appreciate any input, opinions, and help/suggestions.

Honestly, I think you should use what you've got! The biggest issues around glycol setups is when the temperature differential between the glycol and the beer is too great, but you can overcome that with the inkbird.

Cheers,

Kal

 

[MacDee]

Meatballosaurus your intended setup seems very close to what I'm doing for my brewery. This past week I got an Arduino Uno and raspberry pi 3 up and running using the brewpi/Fermentrack setup documentation with a couple changes I mentioned in my previous posts regarding php. The pi is running under Stretch and PHP 7 is being used.
I've got it running and controling on a beer fridge as a test now but I'm awaiting a Tilt hydrometer to incorporate as well.
I've got a chiller in my brewery with a pump that will supply cold 30% glycol to a supply and return loop that will have take offs to & from each of three conical fermentors. But I need them to able to be at different temperatures and follow profiles. I'm building "feed & bleed" systems for each. These systems will each have a circulating pump that will pump glycol through the jacket in a localized loop. When more cooling is needed it will open a valve on the return from the jacket to the main return side of the chiller loop. The pressure at the suction side of the jacket circulating pump will then drop below the supply side of the chiller loop and hence colder glycol will be pulled into the jacket circulation loop until that jacket return valve to the chiller loop is closed. Then the pressure from the jacket return will be higher than the chiller supply loop so no more cold glycol will enter even though there is no valve. If the heat expands the glycol in the jacket loop it can expand into the chiller supply side. Hopefully I'll be able to read the return glycol or fermentor temperature and use the cold side relay to open that return valve when needed to follow a profile. The heating relay could also be used to heat an element inserted in the jacket loop for heating if more than pump energy is needed to heat the loop if needed.

I've designed these "feed & bleed" systems as a Chem Engr in my previous life. I'll let you know if it works out in the brewery.

 

[day_trippr]

Did you have to make any code changes to get everything working on php7?

Cheers!

 

[MacDee]

day_trippr as I mentioned in a previous post I only had to get around the PHP5 not available issue by changing a line in install .sh to "libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-common php-cgi php" instead of the one that had the php5 references in it. It then installed php7. Then there was an apache log error that I fixed with

sudo apt-get install php-mbstring

and a reboot.

 

[pocketmon]

[*]Switch to BrewPiLess. Honestly, I really don't know much about this other than it seems like it has glycol chiller control functionality. It seems like I'd be tossing half of my current setup to switch and would be some amount of labor but not that expensive?


[/LIST]
The amount of information and support from so many individuals available on these forums is just incredible. I really appreciate any input, opinions, and help/suggestions.

Well, you can buy an NodeMcu or D1 mini to try my BrewPiLess. If you don’t like it, you can switch to Fermentrack easily with an additional RPI.


The way BrewPiLess supports glycol is what 0.4.x BrewPi does: if Fridge sensor is not found, the fridge temperature reading will be from beer sensor. To use BPL to control fermentation temperature, simply un-assign "fridge sensor" and adjust PID parameters.

The "glycol temperature control" is optional, you can still use your controller for glycol temperature. Given the fact that the original fridge sensor is assigned to be room sensor and used to measure temperature of glycol, I added some simple code to control temperature of glycol with my unused heating actuator. I guess there are few people use this feature.(Maybe I am the only user.)

 

[meatballosaurus]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. It sounds like maybe in the short term I'll just run with my current setup and in parallel I'll work on building up a BrewPiLess system when I get a little free time.

@pocketmon - So you would have two temp sensors (one for beer, and one for glycol but assigned as room) and two control actuators (one for glycol pump, one for glycol chilling, but no heater), did I understand that correctly?

@MacDee - I'd be very interested in learning more about your setup (maybe it's the MechEng in me) and hearing updates on how it works out. Maybe you could send a pic of the setup or a schematic if you have one.

@kaljade - If I stick with my current setup, are you recommending just using the one sensor in fridge constant mode, or do you think if I use the beer sensor in the conical thermowell, and fridge sensor for glycol (or between insulation jacket and conical?) with the glycol controlled to just below beer temp then I can run it in normal profile mode?

Thanks again everyone, what an awesome community.

 

[kaljade]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. It sounds like maybe in the short term I'll just run with my current setup and in parallel I'll work on building up a BrewPiLess system when I get a little free time.

@pocketmon - So you would have two temp sensors (one for beer, and one for glycol but assigned as room) and two control actuators (one for glycol pump, one for glycol chilling, but no heater), did I understand that correctly?

@MacDee - I'd be very interested in learning more about your setup (maybe it's the MechEng in me) and hearing updates on how it works out. Maybe you could send a pic of the setup or a schematic if you have one.

@kaljade - If I stick with my current setup, are you recommending just using the one sensor in fridge constant mode, or do you think if I use the beer sensor in the conical thermowell, and fridge sensor for glycol (or between insulation jacket and conical?) with the glycol controlled to just below beer temp then I can run it in normal profile mode?

Thanks again everyone, what an awesome community.

The latter with the fridge sensor monitoring the glycol, then use profiles.

 

[pocketmon]

@pocketmon - So you would have two temp sensors (one for beer, and one for glycol but assigned as room) and two control actuators (one for glycol pump, one for glycol chilling, but no heater), did I understand that correctly?

If heating is necessary, you can add a third actuator.

 

[LBussy]

I am unable to view the stderr and stdout via the web interface (maintenance panel). I seem to remember something about this in my past but I don't recall what the resolution was. Do any of you remember the issue/fix? The perms seem to be consistent with the rest of the install:

drwxrwsr-x 2 brewpi brewpi  4096 Jan  8 09:10 logs

-rw-r--r-- 1 brewpi brewpi  632 Jan  8 09:30 stderr.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 brewpi brewpi 1918 Jan  8 09:35 stdout.txt

 

[LBussy]

And as with before I finally found the issue . The clue was in the apache2 log:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function utf8_decode()

Apparently with new versions of php (7.x) one needs to install php-xml.

Just documenting it here in case anyone else hits it

 

[kaljade]

And as with before I finally found the issue . The clue was in the apache2 log:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function utf8_decode()

Apparently with new versions of php (7.x) one needs to install php-xml.

Just documenting it here in case anyone else hits it

Looks like you just earned yourself another (virtual) beer, that's two for two!

 

[LBussy]

I know, I'd better slow down!

 

[kaljade]

I know, I'd better slow down!

LOL!

 

[day_trippr]

Is it possible Elco managed to avoid every deprecated mysql5.6 function even though the host side stuff was written years ago?

Cheers!

 

[Thorrak]

Is it possible Elco managed to avoid every deprecated mysql5.6 function even though the host side stuff was written years ago?

Cheers!

I mean... They kept the important ones intact!

 

[day_trippr]

Seriously, from all I've encountered since php-mysql7 came out I consider that a true feat of forward thinking - and perhaps luck - on Elco's part.
That's the difference between true talent - and the way I tend to yack out code in pretty much any language you can name

Cheers! (I'm always being deprecated! )

 

[bloombrews]

After 3 years of using the older RPi 2.0, I am trying to get a RaspberryPi 3 B running
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package php5 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-cli is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package libapache2-mod-php5 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-common is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-cgi is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package 'libapache2-mod-php5' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-cli' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-common' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-cgi' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5' has no installation candidate
*** ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ***
----------------------------------
See above lines for error message
Setup NOT completed
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewpi-tools $ cd brewpi-tools


Somewhere trying to get this work all day......I see others are getting this error message also.
Hope someone can guide me to the "fix"
thanks
....

 

[day_trippr]

This has been discussed recently - like in the last 20-30 posts.
Take a look here, might get you started in the right direction:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...roller-for-cheap.466106/page-187#post-8476367

Cheers!

 

[bloombrews]

I went back many dozens of posts and did not see any reference to this, other then FANDOM blog. Now I can not even find that same error message on Fandom.....
I am way too burned out reading on how to try and get my BrewPi onto the RPi3-B for tonight.
Thanks again day-trippr, I will try again tomorrow with a fresh head....

 

[CadiBrewer]

Try Fermentrack. You'll be up in less than 20 minutes...

 

[Bigdaddyale]

I went back many dozens of posts and did not see any reference to this, other then FANDOM blog. Now I can not even find that same error message on Fandom.....
I am way too burned out reading on how to try and get my BrewPi onto the RPi3-B for tonight.
Thanks again day-trippr, I will try again tomorrow with a fresh head....

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...roller-for-cheap.466106/page-187#post-8476367

 

[Bigdaddyale]

After 3 years of using the older RPi 2.0, I am trying to get a RaspberryPi 3 B running
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package php5 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-cli is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package libapache2-mod-php5 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-common is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
Package php5-cgi is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package 'libapache2-mod-php5' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-cli' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-common' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-cgi' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5' has no installation candidate
*** ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ***
----------------------------------
See above lines for error message
Setup NOT completed
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewpi-tools $ cd brewpi-tools


Somewhere trying to get this work all day......I see others are getting this error message also.
Hope someone can guide me to the "fix"
thanks
....

day_trippr as I mentioned in a previous post I only had to get around the PHP5 not available issue by changing a line in install .sh to "libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-common php-cgi php" instead of the one that had the php5 references in it. It then installed php7. Then there was an apache log error that I fixed with

sudo apt-get install php-mbstring

and a reboot.

 

[bloombrews]

Try Fermentrack. You'll be up in less than 20 minutes...

Thanks CadiBrewer! I'll try that tomorrow and hopefully sit back and enjoy with my bottle conditioned Belgians!

 

[Bigdaddyale]

Edit : Double post

 

[day_trippr]

day_trippr as I mentioned in a previous post I only had to get around the PHP5 not available issue by changing a line in install .sh to "libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-common php-cgi php" instead of the one that had the php5 references in it. It then installed php7. Then there was an apache log error that I fixed with

sudo apt-get install php-mbstring

and a reboot.

Isn't that exactly the procedure I linked here? https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...roller-for-cheap.466106/page-187#post-8476367

Cheers!

 

[Bigdaddyale]

Isn't that exactly the procedure I linked here? https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...roller-for-cheap.466106/page-187#post-8476367

Cheers!

Whoops, I didn't read the link in your post.