Hey, I had some free time off today and since I don't have a brewing set up anywhere close to my current location, I naturally started work on designing a new gadget 
.
I am thinking about using an Arduino board along with the ever popular STC 1000 to measure fermentation temperatures and transmit it via wireless to a base station.
Implementation Details:
From what I have read, the probes for the STC 1000 are thermistors, meaning the impedance of the probe should change as it's temperature changes. I don't have my stc 1000 with me right now, but I was thinking about probing the input pin on the stc 1000 with a lead going into one of the arduino's ADC input pins.
I am speculating that the STC-1000 is dropping a voltage across the thermistor and is determining it's impedance by measuring the potential across a resistor with a known impedance that is in series with it. Using this, you end up with the following equation:
Thermistor Impedance = (Input Voltage - Output Voltage) * (Known Impedance/Output Voltage)
Once I digitized the voltage reading I would try and come up with some voltage to temperature model that I could use to come up with a temperature reading with. Apparently according to this article, these thermistors are not very linear so look tables are used in practice to determine the temperature and not some kind of equation like the one I cooked up.
http://hackaday.com/2014/03/15/temperature-controller-gets-open-source-firmware-upgrade/
Once I had temperature readings working, I would next like to transmit these readings to my laptop which would be on the same Wi-Fi network, once the laptop received these readings it would plot them using GNU plot and store them in a text file for safe keeping later.
Bigger Picture
I think it could be a really fun project, I already have written code for the ardunino and pc that can handle the data acquisition, transmission, graphing, and storage. I think at the end of the day that this project would allow us to gain a better understanding of how our process at home changes OUR fermentation on OUR setup with OUR practices.
One could grab a temperature reading once a second if they wanted to and could have all kinds of data about what is going on inside of the carboy. Did pitching more yeast really decrease the time needed for fermentation to kick off? Did the oxygen reduce lag time? One could do blind tastings of beer and try and figure out which ones had the hottest fermentation and then use the graphs as evidence.
For lager makers you could use this information to tell when fermentation was slowing down so that you could determine when to start the D-rest.
A really cool use of this would be to see how stable your fermentation chamber was keeping the beers temperature.
To make this work the best that it can, I would place the stc-1000's probe inside of thermowel that would site directly inside of the wort.
What do you guys think?
.I am thinking about using an Arduino board along with the ever popular STC 1000 to measure fermentation temperatures and transmit it via wireless to a base station.
Implementation Details:
From what I have read, the probes for the STC 1000 are thermistors, meaning the impedance of the probe should change as it's temperature changes. I don't have my stc 1000 with me right now, but I was thinking about probing the input pin on the stc 1000 with a lead going into one of the arduino's ADC input pins.
I am speculating that the STC-1000 is dropping a voltage across the thermistor and is determining it's impedance by measuring the potential across a resistor with a known impedance that is in series with it. Using this, you end up with the following equation:
Thermistor Impedance = (Input Voltage - Output Voltage) * (Known Impedance/Output Voltage)
Once I digitized the voltage reading I would try and come up with some voltage to temperature model that I could use to come up with a temperature reading with. Apparently according to this article, these thermistors are not very linear so look tables are used in practice to determine the temperature and not some kind of equation like the one I cooked up.
http://hackaday.com/2014/03/15/temperature-controller-gets-open-source-firmware-upgrade/
Once I had temperature readings working, I would next like to transmit these readings to my laptop which would be on the same Wi-Fi network, once the laptop received these readings it would plot them using GNU plot and store them in a text file for safe keeping later.
Bigger Picture
I think it could be a really fun project, I already have written code for the ardunino and pc that can handle the data acquisition, transmission, graphing, and storage. I think at the end of the day that this project would allow us to gain a better understanding of how our process at home changes OUR fermentation on OUR setup with OUR practices.
One could grab a temperature reading once a second if they wanted to and could have all kinds of data about what is going on inside of the carboy. Did pitching more yeast really decrease the time needed for fermentation to kick off? Did the oxygen reduce lag time? One could do blind tastings of beer and try and figure out which ones had the hottest fermentation and then use the graphs as evidence.
For lager makers you could use this information to tell when fermentation was slowing down so that you could determine when to start the D-rest.
A really cool use of this would be to see how stable your fermentation chamber was keeping the beers temperature.
To make this work the best that it can, I would place the stc-1000's probe inside of thermowel that would site directly inside of the wort.
What do you guys think?
