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.