Brewery Programming

[barneey]

Cheers Steve,

Inorder to get the best deal, I`m going to order the bulk thro RS and the relay thro Farnell, some of the components at Farnell also attract the added shipping charge. Before placing an order anyone else in the UK making one?

[Matho]

Hey barneey, glad you got it sorted, I have not sent any more PCB's over to the UK, just to let you know.

cheers

[barneey]

Thx for letting me know, I`ll place my orders later today for the components, I`m sure to have loads of questions later in the week

[Fil]

last 2 sets of bits arrived in todays post buttons and led bezels now for the build....

[Gricey]

Wow, I have been meaning to do something very similar to you guys for a long time but the project had stalled. I will give this thread a good read and see where I get to. I am very confident in programming but my electronics are cack, hence I plan to cheat and have lots of nice 7 segment displays but run them over serial somehow. The overall skeleton of the program I mapped out almost as a set of states, e.g, heat HLT, mash/recirc, sparge, boil, whirlpool, and so on. Will have to kick everything back off and see where we are

I have most of the bits, just no fecking time. Also sealing all my SS pots is proving a giant pain in the nads.

[darkonnis]

Out of interest chaps how easy/hard as this been and if you dont mind my asking, as a rough estimate how much has it cost? I'm planning a 10L single vessel braumeister style set up and fancy one of these over a standard PID... but After a look though I can't help but think i wouldnt even know where to solder everything up to!
Any help would be much appreciated,
cheers,
Cooky

[Fil]

the arduino isnt the cheaper option. depending on what you need to buy in it could run to twice as much or more, And take significantly longer to knock up..

but its easy to plug all the components into a breadboard (you get one in the arduino starter kit, with plug in wires and some components), and get it working, its electronics as leggo would have designed it.. any hardware supported has a library of functions, and an example detailing its connection, and generally a page on the arduino playground depicting the connections.

i ebayed longer prototyping wires, and a couple of diddy breadboards and am sticking it in the box as is with hot glue securing connections. Matho designed his own shield a plug in board to take all the components, a far superior solution...

you cant totally avoid the soldering iron tho, well unless you try the conductive glues??

[darkonnis]

soldering isnt a problem, im a dab hand I just dont know where it all wants to live :O Dear do is it? hmm.... Might be a PID jobby after all then, atleast to start with.

[dean_wales]

here are some more photos of it powered up



cheers steve

Now that is the kind of kickass DIY kit that I dream of having. Nice work.

One day I will have one!

Dean.

[Matho]

there have been boards made in the usa and brazil so if someone wants to make up some in uk/europe that would be cool.
A couple of things that have turned up, the first one is when the last stage ends on a pump rest the boil does not happen so I have made a very small change to the code to fix this problem

https://github.com/mathoaus/braumiser-c ... duino2.ino

the next problem was when people tried to switch 240v pumps with the relay on the board, it caused the LCD to scramble or the adruino to stop all together, so it looks like if you are switching a 240v pump you will need to use an RC snubber across the pump or contacts to suppress the noise.

http://www.redlion.net/Products/Groups/ ... /12027.pdf

cheers steve

[stringy]

wow very impressive!

I'm currently using an arduino to control and log fermentation temperatures.
I've got my demijohns sat in a waterbath which is cooled with cold water from a beer chiller being pumped around a copper coil in the waterbath. I looked into using the PID function, but gave up. The pump only needs to be running a few seconds in order to bring down the temp of the waterbath, so I got very frustrated with lots of overshooting and gave up. At the moment I'm using a function where the pump is only allowed to come on for 4seconds and then has to wait 2 minutes before it comes on again. I've arrived at this by trial and error and works fine for ales, but I have to tweak the code if I want the set up cooler for doing lagers.

I'm tempted to play with the PID again, could anyone explain which of the paramaters I need to set to take into account the fact my set up is very sensitive and easy to overshoot?

If anyones interested my arduino code (& associated python script for getting the current temp & sending to opensen.se) is HERE

[Fil]

sounds great, any pics of the setup ?

If your hitting and maintaining temps, the pid could be overkill, its a lot simpler to implement than understand tho.. to get the best pid setings, also incorporate the pid autotune lib and run it with the physical setup to derive the optimum control paramaters, tho i think Jabba is still running with the out of the box defaults..

[stringy]

I dont have any pics to hand, but can take some later and post.

I think you're right about PID being overkill. At the moment the setup does the job. I think I might tweak the code to implement some if statements, so that the cooling cycles differ depending on my target temperature. That would remove the hassle of having to re-tweak when I change to fermenting a lager.

When I have time I'll try the PID again, but for the foreseeable future I'll be fermenting beers so it will have to wait a while!

[Matho]

I have changed the PCB to include a cap and resistor across the pump contact to suppress EMI produced when switching an AC pump
here are the eagle files and gerber
http://www.mediafire.com/?lz14kayxn3w43by

One brewer has had a problem with the unit starting the stage countdown well before the stage temp has been reached, all I could put it down to was there was a wrong read of the DS18b20 that was above the set temp that cause the timer to start. I have modified the code so that it needs 2 reads, 3 seconds apart to start the countdown. I haven't tested it properly yet but when I do I'll post the code.

cheers steve

[Fil]

not in your league Steve, but my own brewputer based on Jabbas work is back on track.. i got sidelined with grand project creep... and then shelved it until i had the plan for the brewery it should control. well the brewery is now on the horizon so its time to turn back to this....



inside its just prototype wires n plugs at the moment.. but now i have sussed externaly mounting the heatsinks, i no longer need a fan or vents, And finally have room to cram in a dc power supply for the brewputer. the pids are back ups. but i have been using one for my hlt control in the 1/2 cut and assembled box for too long..


i have found a pt100 lib for the arduino since shelving this so my plans were to incorporate the same plugs and probes used for the pids but as i put it together for testing last night i discovered a vast discrepency in the accuracy of my bargain pt100 probes... and wihout the ssrs and heatsinks inside i have more room for sockets for the ds18520's... cant find my probes, may have to make more...