City will play: Linux+python+raspberry Pi Brewing beer

I started making homemade beer about 10 years ago, and like many of my own brewers, I started to make purified beer in the kitchen. It took some equipment and it was really good beer, and finally, I used a big storage tank with all the barley in it as my malt barrel. I made 5 gallons of beer a few years later, but it took the same amount of time and utility to make 10 gallons (only the container was bigger than before), and that's what I did before. After 10 gallons of capacity, I stumbled across Strangebrew Elsinore, and I realized what I really needed was to transform the entire winemaking process into an electronic one and run it with raspberry.

Building your own home electric brewing system requires a lot of technical information in this area, and many people who learn to brew it start on the theelectricbrewery.com site, but it's very complicated to build those controls together, even though the easiest way to summarize it on this site is very good. Of course you can also use a small cost method and still get the same results--use a hot water bottle and a hot wine container to heat up your brewing material with a PID controller. But I think it's a bit boring (which means you can't experience the full winemaking process).

The hardware that needs to be used

Before I started this project, I decided to start buying parts, and my most basic design was a hot wine container (HLT) and a boiling pot that could be heated to 5500 watts, plus a live-bottom malt barrel, and I let the pump recycle the malt in a hot wine container through a 50-foot stainless steel coil (" Heat exchange recirculation mash system, also called herms). At the same time I need another pump to circulate the water in the hot wine container, and transfer the water to the malt barrel, and the entire electronic component is controlled by raspberry.

Building my electronic winemaking system and automating as much as possible means that I need the following components:

• A 5500-watt electronically heated alcohol container (HLT)

• A 50-foot (0.5-inch) Stainless steel coil (heat exchange recirculating mash system) that can be placed in a heated alcohol container

• A 5500-watt electric kettle

• Multiple solid state relay heating switches

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2 High-temperature food-grade pumps

• Switch relays for pumps

• Removable unit and a silicon tube

• Stainless steel ball valve

• A probe for measuring temperature

• Many lines

• A circuit box to accommodate these accessories

To establish the details of the electrification of the brewing system the Electric brewery this site is a good summary, I will not repeat here, when you plan to use Raspberry Pi instead of this PID controller, you can read the following suggestions.

One important thing to note is that the solid state relay (SSR) signal voltage, many tutorials recommend using a 12 volt solid state relay to turn off the circuit, the Raspberry Pi GPIO pin socket only supports a 3 volt output voltage, however, a relay must be purchased to turn the voltage into 3 volts.
 
to run the brewing system, your Raspberry Pi must do two key things: measure the temperature from several different locations and use a relay switch to control the heating element , the Raspberry Pi is easy to handle these tasks.

Here are some different ways to connect a temperature sensor to a Raspberry Pi, but I found the most convenient way to use a single bus. This allows multiple sensors to share the same line (actually three lines), which can make the brewing system more convenient for multiple devices to work, and if you want to find a waterproof ds18b20 temperature sensor from the Internet, you can find a lot of options. I use the Hitachi DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor.

To control the heating element, the Raspberry Pi includes several bus extenders (GPIO) for software addressing, which will allow you to send a 3.3v voltage to a relay by writing to a file at 0 or 1, and this GPIO when I first learned how the Raspberry Pi works The Raspberry Pi tutorial for driving relays is most helpful to me, the bus extender controls multiple solid state relays, which directly control the switch of the heating element through the brewing software.

I first put all the parts into this circuit box because it would be a rolling trolley, I would make it easy to move, not fixed, if I had a store (like in a garage, a tool room, or a basement), I needed a bigger circuit box on the wall, And now I've found a waterproof engineering box of the right size that can put everything in it, and finally it becomes a compact tool box and can work. In the lower left corner is the expansion board connected to the Raspberry Pi for the bus extender to the single bus temperature probe and the solid state relay.

To maintain a 240v solid state relay temperature is not high, I cut a hole in the box, outside the box with a CPU cooling gel to install the copper fin heat sink outside the box between the hot groove. It works very well, there is no temperature problem in the box, I put two switch 120v sockets on the box lid, plus two 240v LEDs to show whether the heating element is energized. I use the dryer socket and plug, so can easily disconnect the electric kettle connection. Everything worked fine the first time you tried it. (The first drawing of the circuit will have a return)

This photo comes from the "concept" version, the final production system should have more than two solid state relays, so that the 240v circuit two pins can switch, in addition I will be through the software to switch the pump switch. They are now controlled by physical switches in front of the box, but they are also easily controlled with relays.

The only thing left to be tricky is the temperature probe's crimp joint, which is mounted on a T-shaped connector in front of the bottom valve that heats the alcohol container and the malt barrel ball. When the liquid flows through the temperature sensor, the temperature can be displayed accurately. I'm thinking of adding a casing to the kettle, but it's no use for my brewing process. Finally, I bought a one-fourth-inch crimp fitting that worked perfectly.

Software

Once the hardware was sorted out, I had time to process the software, and I ran the latest Raspbian release on the Raspberry Pi, nothing special about the operating system.

I started using Strangebrew elsinore winemaking software when my friend asked me if I had heard of Hosehead (a Raspberry Pi based wine controller) and I found Strangebrew Elsinore. I think Hosehead is great, but I'm not going to buy a wine controller, but to challenge myself and build one of my own.

Setting Strangebrew Elsinore is straightforward and its documentation is straightforward, without encountering any problems. Although Strangebrew Elsinore works very well, running Java on my generation of Raspberry Pi is sometimes laborious and crashes more than once. I see this software development stalled and sad, as if they didn't have more contributors to the larger community (though many people still use it).

Craftbeerpi

Then I stumbled across a Python-written craftbeerpi, which has an active contributor-supported development community. The original author (and current maintainer), Manuel Fritsch, has done a good job of contributing and handling feedback issues. It took me a little time to clone this warehouse and start. Its README document is also a good example of connecting a DS1820 temperature sensor, as well as considerations for hardware interfaces to Raspberry Pi or chip computers.

At startup, Craftbeerpi guides the user through a setup process to discover whether the temperature probe is available and lets you specify which GPIO bus extender pointer to manage which accessory on the Raspberry Pi.

It's easy to make homemade wine with this system, I can rely on it to master the reliable temperature, I could enter multiple temperature segments to control the malt temperature, and the days of brewing with Craftbeerpi are a little tired, but I am glad to use the traditional manual management of propane burner "excitement" in exchange for the effectiveness and continuity of the system.

The user-friendliness of the Craftbeerpi encouraged me to set up another controller to run the "fermentation room". As far as I'm concerned, it's a second-hand refrigerator, and I spent $50 plus a $25 heater on it. The Craftbeerpi is easy to control the heat and cold of electrical components, and you can also set multiple temperature stages. For example, this chart shows the fermentation temperature of my recent IPA process. Fermentation chamber fermented wort takes 4 days at 67f° temperature and then rises every 12 hours until the temperature reaches 72f°. The remaining two days of temperature remain constant for diacetyl generation. After 5 days the temperature drops to 65f°, this time is lets the beer change "dries", finally the beer fermentation temperature drops directly to 38f°. Craftbeerpi can be added to all stages to make software management easier to ferment.

I've also tried to monitor the proportion of yeast beer with liquid gravity Totsuka, which can be achieved by a floating sensor connected by Bluetooth. There is an integrated plan that will make CRAFTBEERPI work well, and now it records these specific gravity data into Google's spreadsheets. Once the liquid gravity meter can be connected to the fermentation controller, the set of automatic fermentation settings will be based on the activity of the yeast directly and more easily, rather than complete the main fermentation within 4 days, you can set the temperature after 24 hours of stable gravity.

For some projects like this, it is easy to conceive and plan for improvements and additions to the components, but I am happy with what I have experienced today. I used this device to brew a lot of beer, to achieve the desired wort ratio every time, and the beer was always delicious. My most important consumer--that's me! I'm glad I can drink at any time.

City will play: Linux+python+raspberry Pi Brewing beer