Hello, long time absent, but sometimes lurking, and still home brewing beer member here. I recently posted a survey about "smart kegging" a while ago, and got some pretty decent feedback. After reading the results, I found people are interested in "smart kegging" but don't really want to spend more than $100 bucks to get it set up.
I know there are several solutions for adding an app to a kegerator, but most of them seem to have features that I don't need / want.
First, there was kegbot, which was cool, except for the price for all the hardware and soldering to get started. There were a few us that actually spent the time to solder up a kegboard shield, and even wire up a solenoid cut off valve to prevent people from drinking excess home brew.
Thus, KegCop was born from the existing hardware of the kegbot project.
Then, the Raspberry Pi was released, and changed a lot of things. With the advent of the Pi being released for $35.00 it made all hardware systems obsolete, and a new program to monitor your kegs was born, RaspberryPints.
I don't dislike RaspberryPints, but I don't think wiring up a LCD / monitor to my kegerator is necessary. Basically I just want to have a flow meter inline with the flow of beer in my kegerator so I can monitor how much beer is left in the keg and know what brew is on tap. And since everyone has a smart phone nowadays why not just publish an app in the Apple App Store, and for Google Play using a library such as react-native because JavaScript is a popular programming language and react-native deploys to both iOS and Android.
So I decided to create a new github project Keg Cop R to fullfill the app portion of the project. A back end / app for the Pi will need to be written more than likely in Python.
Anyways, I plan on releasing the app (Keg Cop R) for both iOS and Android, and plan on making it 100% free and open source.
Finally, if this seems like something you could contribute to that would be awesome.
In closing, I'll do my best to post updates in this thread from time to time.
I know there are several solutions for adding an app to a kegerator, but most of them seem to have features that I don't need / want.
First, there was kegbot, which was cool, except for the price for all the hardware and soldering to get started. There were a few us that actually spent the time to solder up a kegboard shield, and even wire up a solenoid cut off valve to prevent people from drinking excess home brew.
Thus, KegCop was born from the existing hardware of the kegbot project.
Then, the Raspberry Pi was released, and changed a lot of things. With the advent of the Pi being released for $35.00 it made all hardware systems obsolete, and a new program to monitor your kegs was born, RaspberryPints.
I don't dislike RaspberryPints, but I don't think wiring up a LCD / monitor to my kegerator is necessary. Basically I just want to have a flow meter inline with the flow of beer in my kegerator so I can monitor how much beer is left in the keg and know what brew is on tap. And since everyone has a smart phone nowadays why not just publish an app in the Apple App Store, and for Google Play using a library such as react-native because JavaScript is a popular programming language and react-native deploys to both iOS and Android.
So I decided to create a new github project Keg Cop R to fullfill the app portion of the project. A back end / app for the Pi will need to be written more than likely in Python.
Anyways, I plan on releasing the app (Keg Cop R) for both iOS and Android, and plan on making it 100% free and open source.
Finally, if this seems like something you could contribute to that would be awesome.
In closing, I'll do my best to post updates in this thread from time to time.
