Home Brew Controller - 15th March - Project Aims and initial parts list

I'm aware that many things like the BrewPi exist, but I didn't want to overcomplicate things and use a Raspberry Pi plus extra hardware. I just wanted something simple that didn't include all the extras like heater/chiller and pump control (as I don't have all these things yet, just a few buckets and boilers)!

Primary Aim:

• Monitor the temperature of 
• water/wort during a sparge
• wort when cooling (after a boil)
• wort when fermenting
• locally (on an LCD screen)
• remote via a web interface over WiFi (potentially with graphing) so I don't have to go out and check on it from time to time)

Secondary Aims:

• Control things based on temperatures (so I don't have to go out to the garage to turn switches on/off)
• The boiler (turn it off automatically after the 1-2 hour boil after hopping)
• brewbelt (to keep the wort warm during fermentation in the winter)

Hardware (Parts list):

I already had most of these parts from previous electronics projects:

• 1x Nodemcu
• 1x DHT22
• 2x DS18B20 temperatue probes (on 3m cables)
• 1x LCD display 16x2 characters
• 4x Analog resistor ladder switches
• 1x 433Mhz RF transmitter (for mains sockets, safer and cheaper than wiring up my own mains relays for boilers)

Software

For circuit/breadboard diagrams I will probably be using fritzing. Recently they started charging a small fee for compiled downloads to support development, but you can still download and install it for free on a mac using homebrew 😁 (pun not intentional) with the command brew install --cask fritzing

For diagrams, I will probably be using this nodemcu part

https://github.com/roman-minyaylov/fritzing-parts/tree/master/esp8266-nodemcu-v3

And I found some good code for controlling the LCD menu

https://majicdesigns.github.io/MD_Menu/ and https://github.com/MajicDesigns/MD_Menu

Along with a library to read the switch inputs

https://github.com/MajicDesigns/MD_UISwitch https://majicdesigns.github.io/MD_UISwitch/class_m_d___u_i_switch___analog.html

I almost used this library https://tsibrov.blogspot.com/2020/09/LiquidCrystal-I2C-Menu.html but found the translated instructions a bit hard to understand.

Alternatively, I could just use BrewPiLess, but what would be the point in that?!

https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess/blob/master/doc/HardwareGeneral.md

https://www.primetimebrewers.com/post/piless-brewpi

Homebrew Controller (for controlling and monitoring my beer brewing in my garage)

It's been a long time since I've updated this blog (almost 5 years) and as you can see from the lack of posts most of the smarthome ideas I originally had haven't actually happened! Mostly through laziness, but more recently because my 1.5 year old daughter has been taking up most of my free time (in a good way).

But, I'm now getting 2-3 hours a day on weekends when my daughter and wife are napping, which is perfect time to add some content and finish off a project I've imagined for a while.... a custom beer brewing controller!

I started a prototype of this a year ago (in the summer of 2020) and over the last few months I've been randomly ordering extra parts and planning how to take this off the breadboard and finish it off. I'll try to document the progress on this blog with weekly updates. I've got a few weeks worth of posts written as drafts, but I should get caught up at some point soon and then I can post realtime progress as I go.

My next post will contain a bit more technical detail of what I've got so far, what it does, and what I want it to do when finished, but for now here are 2 photos while I tidy up the mess of my most recent soldering session.

This is the breadboard prototype that I've been using in 2020:

It's hard to make out the screen, but it displays the garage temperature and humitidy (using a DHT22 sensor) and shows two (A and B) waterproof probe temperatures. It has a web interface that I can access from my LAN to display the same temperature data.

And this is it on my desk next to the enclosure I bought for a few quid off ebay that I want to move it all into once the project is finished.