Grainfather London brown ale 2 temp probes

Grainfather London brown ale

IOT laser cut case

for Nodemcu 1.0 esp8266 and oled 0.9″
download here at github

Grain father 15l wit brew day

My first brewday with the Grainfather went well.  My brew controller in place.  Still to do:

Wire the second socket for Grainfather mains powered pump

Figure how to send the temperature data to thingspeak.  This is not trivial as they are floating point numbers.

Wit beer fermenting at thingspeak fermentation

Wizbrew controller openardbir temperature calibrartion

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

It’s time to update my brew controller to fix a couple of bugs and improve performance.

• I omitted the temperature offset setting in my Temperature() function.  The offset value is set by the user and stored in eeprom.  I settled on +0.3 deg C using my glass thermometer as a reference and tea kettle!
• Got rid of the spurious display momentarily appearing during one of the 3 sprite showings.  I turned off two of the sprites,  only showing the ardbir sprite and all’s fine
• I reduced the resolution of the onewire temperature controller reading to 10 bit.  The previous vale of 12bit response to temperature change was a bit slow which affected PID tight temperature control

Updated code will be posted soon.  Latest code available

 

Saison fermentation

Thought I’d share my fermentation graph near the start of my 5 gallon saison fermentation. I’m using a glass carboy this time so the temperature probe is right down into the heart of the wort. Getting much finer temperature control now 24 deg C +- 0.05

Live co2 bubble interval click here

Grodziskie data for day 6 and initial thoughts

Finally I’ve had a quiet moment to have a look at the data I have collected before festivities began.  The orange data is fermentation temperature in an enclosed chamber, data in deg. centigrade.  Blue data is intervals between bubbles in an S type airlock.  As can be immediately observed,  even after a couple of beverages,  is that the period of both waveforms look very similar.  There is a lag time between data sets as may be expected.  The data sets are also 180 deg (ish with lag time taken off) out of phase which also may be expected.

What surprises me though is the amplitude of bubble interval with a small increment of data.  The temperature for the data set being 19 deg c +- 0.3 .  Whereas the interval at this stage was 125 secs +- 60 secs.  The other interesting fact from this is that opening the lid of the fermenter producing a sustained quickening of bubbles,  no stirring of yeast required.

What are your thoughts on this?

Bubble catcher instructables

BubbleCatcher on instructables.com

IOT Bubble watch

Bubbles are detected using a cheap optical sensor device. The time between pulses is recorded and displayed. Next step is IOT using esp8266 device and thingspeak

wiz brew controller mkII wiring

After a faulty 12v transformer which blew a capacitor,  it’s down to wiring .  I tested the pump, heat and buzzer switching which work fine.  The one temperature probe is showing good temperature.  Now to order some zip ties to tidy the wiring.

OPENARDBIR BREW CONTROLLER BUILD MKII update

So, it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to get back to this project, 3 between days to be precise.

Anyhow,  all holes have between drilled and all essential parts have been ordered and received.

All that’s left to do is the internal wiring,  put up the parts list,  then a wet run without grain so there are no sprites on brew day (well, as few as possible).