Tilt Hydrometer - Can it Control a Fridge?

[Bassman2003]

Hello,

I am looking at the Tilt device and was wondering if anybody knows or uses it to control a fermentation fridge? With the Pi functionality I thought this would be a possibility to use the temperature readings but do not know if I am off base or not.

The $135 price is a little hard to justify as a gravity device alone but if I could add some fridge control it would be nice.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Rob2010SS]

I have one but only use it as a gravity device and keeping track of fermentations. Curious to hear if it can be used to control a fridge.

 

[dmtaylor]

I think a tech-savvy person could get the Tilt to work as a feedback input to a PID control device.

I am not that savvy.

 

[Bassman2003]

Yes, that was what I was thinking. The temperature readings flying out of the Tilt could maybe be used to control a Pi based fridge setup. But am not sure how many gymnastics would be involved. Hopefully a tech savvy person will stop by.

 

[Derp]

I use this to control a chest freezer that I use as a fermentation chamber, so it should work with a fridge.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...irmware-wifi-brewpi-no-arduino-needed.586476/

EDIT: I don't use the Tilt to control the temperature, but Fermentrack has Tilt support, so I assume it's possible.

I built a controller similar to this one, but with SSRs and a couple of modifications.

 

[Bassman2003]

Thanks for your post. I will investigate this setup and will e-mail Tilt to see if they have any input as well. I do not want it to be too complicated.

 

[Jayjay1976]

Hot damn what a cool idea! I've been wanting to buy a tilt, and the fermentation tracking alone didn't justify the cost. Add to that the ability to pre-program a ferm temp profile that automatically follows the progress of fermentation makes it an awesome deal. I already have a raspberry pi and a single carboy ferm chamber, I'm more than halfway there! FFS it could text me when it's done and even schedule bottling day in my outlook calendar! WHY ISN'T THIS ALREADY A THING??!!

 

[day_trippr]

I wouldn't assume Fermentrack does anything more than plot the Tilt gravity (and perhaps temp) readings...

Cheers!

 

[Tomvond]

Craftbeerpi has a plug in for TILT. So I can imagine that if your fridge is controlled by your cbpi that this can happen easily.

 

[doug293cz]

Craftbeerpi has a plug in for TILT. So I can imagine that if your fridge is controlled by your cbpi that this can happen easily.

This should work. But you need to make sure you do adequate filtering (smoothing) of the temp output of the Tilt as it is very jittery. It's easy to pick up a trend line from a plot visually, but using the normal output to turn a fridge on/off would be a mess. The required filtering will slow the control response, but it might not be an issue in the real world.

Brew on

 

[Bassman2003]

Thanks for your input. Sounds like there is a chance it would work.

 

[Bassman2003]

I contacted the Tilt company and they are looking into this setup and are working on some documentation. I also mentioned the concept of smoothing out the temperature readings and they were open to this are checking it out. So hopefully this will turn into something.