Smart kegarator

[traetox]

I built a smart kegarator for my wedding last year and shared it on reddit, a friend mentioned that I should drop it here as well in case anyone else was interested. The hardware is a RaspberryPi B with a beefcake relay and a few DS18B20 temperature sensors. I used a standard cheap chest freezer from Lowes. All code is open source under the MIT license.

The smart kegarator tracks temperatures and controls the compressor to provide very tight temperature control, all written in go (and some javascript for the web interface). The system allows you to set a temperature range for a number of sensors and ensure that your beers are at the perfect temperature. It also tracks when the compressor is on and provides a total run time with cost estimate (you have to provide your cooler power draw in watts and your power cost in cents per KW/h).
https://github.com/traetox/kegarator


The whole system is one '!' away from controlling a heater (distillery), so if you are interested in rigging it in that direction let me know

 

[day_trippr]

Wrt to that ! and the incipient hot-side controls, note that you posted this to a Home Brewing forum, so instead of thinking "distillery", think "fermentation chamber".

That capability is worth multiples of any kegerator controller, which frankly doesn't appear to interest very many folks, when they can simply set their oem fridge thermostats and forget about it. And, let's face it, most folks can't tell the difference between a 40°F pour and a 45°F pour.

fwiw, a bunch of us run BrewPi on RPi's with some compatible form of Arduino (I use Uno R3 boards but there's a pretty wide gamut of boards being used by HBTers). Most use it for fermentation chamber control, but some of us also use it for keezer control. There are a few BrewPi threads extant on HBT.

Cheers! And Good Luck with your project!

[edit] Also, if you want to give your smart kegerator an upgrade, give RaspberryPints a look.
There are a couple of active threads on that one on hbt, too, with a handful of us lending support where we can...