All posts by Richard Page

BrewPi, Home Brew

update New – Old Fridge

After a bit of a delay This evening I’ll be picking up my New-Old Fridge.
It’ll have to be transported on it’s side in the back of my Estate car Oops so after getting to the Brew Shed will have to be left to settle for a day or two as  I don’t want the compressor oil up it’s cooling tubes…Crying
Over those settling days I’ll start to convert it to a second BrewPi Fermentation Setup and then put it into use as a conditioning fridge!
Hopefully I’ll remember to take piccies of the conversion along the way !

******update 8th Jun*****

After picking up and defrosting the freezer with a hose and letting it settle overnight It’s now being used as a conditioning fridge with the STC1000  the @BrewPi is a bit too much overKill  Plus I’ve not currently got the coding Skills to get my dev system up and running …

IMG_4058 IMG_4076 Before and after shot of the freezer defrost

 

The fridge part nicely takes  a couple of corny kegs and there’s a convenient entry point for the CO2 and NTC thermister  at the back  Cool

IMG_4064 IMG_4066 IMG_4077
termostat housing convenient entry for Probe and CO2 line 2 kegs holding at 10.5 c
Home Brew

2nd FV Blow off modification

I’d been pondering how to get the Temperature  probe into the Second FV, and after seeing Coombes69 build  it gave me the idea of using a John Guest speed fitting that I had spare. 12mm hole and the John Guest speed fitting fits a treat. My blow off bottle isn’t as fancy but what the heck it’ll work !

IMG_4041 IMG_4042

 

IMG_4043

BrewPi

SSR purchase

After reading  Coombes69 troubles with Cheap Chinese  Fotek  SSR’s  and whilst  browsing on Ebay, I came across the following listing http://r.ebay.com/X1rmLN listed as ERL SSRs but are in fact ERI SSR’s made by Electronic Relays India and seem to have been around for 25 years so I decided to get a couple

$T2eC16N,!yEE9s5jE,)jBRn1oW3EI!~~60_57

I can’t find the exact model on their website  so I’m hoping they’re an old model
I’ll let you know how they work out Ha Ha

 

****Update****
  They have arrived, obviously not new other  as the seller said  the part number 009-0022313 suggests that they are from ATM machines and are possibly also made by powersem   data sheet  pdf 

BrewPi

@BrewPi thoughts I2C

Two new I2C boards arrived  very quickly from China .  I need to get on and get to grips  with my novice attempts at trying to use them in my BrewPi dev system,  I’m realising just what a novice at C++ I really am.
I found another library fron DigiSpark that works and looks more compact than ones listed on arduino-info site.

I’d tried to adapt the Brewpi code to use the i2c code on the arduino-info site without much success and It’s got to the point where because i haven’t read up enough  I’m thinking of replacing the functional code from the DigiSpark drivers into the SPi drivers done by Elco . I need to try and find more time to learn and read more tutorials on C++ Tutorial – Introduction to C++ – Cprogramming.com.  Maybe if I ask both Elco and MDMA they can integrate it into the Dyna build as an option but I’ll wait until the current build frenzy is out of the way…

General, Home Brew

#BrewDay

Yesterdays #BrewDay didn’t go without it’s problems !Hell Boy
I need to sort out the mesh in the bottom of the Mashtun, either that or get another Stainless Steel mash Tun with a better fitting False bottom ! The grist came past the edges of the mesh and blocked the copper tube filter plus the Weight of 9Kg of malt didn’t help !
Then in the Last 1/2 of the boil the thermal trip on the boiler kept cutting out so boil was at 88c… In the end the contents were dumped back into the mash tun and the boiler bottom was removed and the trip bypassed Oops
The boil then resumed…

Took longer than anticipated but lets hope the Trappist/Bastogne ale  comes out ok Big Smile

OG of the Bastogne 1.080 which is pretty close to the design value of the Beersmith recipe

Now what temperature should i throttle it down to  ? Smile1 don’t want too much of that banana in there …

BrewPi

more @brewpi Bank Holiday Musings

I’m sat here idly musing about conditioning beer in corny kegs in my  @brewpi fridge. Since the beer probe can’t get into the keg and have the stabilising mass of the beer around it, the @brewpi tends to oscillate a bit. So the probe needs insulating, at first I thought of magnets embedded in some sort of insulation but these don’t stick very well to stainless steel. Maybe I could come up with a suction cup affair to reliably hold the insulation ? Insulating tape tends to come unstuck or leave  sticky patches,  maybe a big elastic band ?
Maybe the Brewpi needs a 1 probe point control mode either that or I just use the ST1000 for the conditioning fridge.. I think  that I’ll muse some more over a beer from the shed Hell Boy

Screen Shot 2013-05-27 at 16.34.32

General, Home Brew

#BrewDay Not

I had planned to have a brewday on this Bank Holiday Monday, but instead I’m having a Social Day…
Something has aggravated the old Back.
The recipe was to be this..

Screen Shot 2013-05-27 at 11.29.59

Although Since I was having trouble getting the Bastogne Yeast, I had to settle for

White Labs WLP500 – Trappist Ale Yeast

Once in the FV I was going to keep a tight control on the temperatureDribble as it’s rumoured to a bit unwieldy , we’ll see …

Thats if the yeast is Ok as it’s been stored in the fridge for 3 weeks whilst waiting for Orange Peel !! 
Hopefully i’ll get to it later in the week or next weekend Big Smile

I have also been tweaking the BrewPi web code to show me which system I am looking at.
I have changed the hostname  of each system, found in /etc/hostname and also not forgetting to change it in /etc/hosts  ..
I have two RaspberryPi controller BrewPi’s, one in a green Case and the other in a Black case so naturally they’re greenpi and blackpi Smile
I changed line 29 in the beer-panel.php to

<span id=”beername”><?php echo gethostname();?> Is Fermenting: <?php echo $beerName;?></span>

and also changed the index.php line 39 to be

<title><?php echo gethostname();?> reporting for duty!</title>

much better, I can now tell which is which. Big Smile

General

new-old brew fridge

A family friend is getting a new fridge/freezer Big Boss

So next week end I will become the lucky benefactor and a second Beer fridge will spring into life….Big Smile

Watch this space there may be conversion in progress for  another fermenter or a conditioning  setup …