Today I have managed to squeeze in a Brew Day, A batch of Holy Purple Cow, Batch 3 , I just need to order some Citra hops to arrive just after we’ll be arriving home ready for the Dry hopping ! I will leave it fermenting in the hands of the Dependable Arduino Rev A BrewPi setup, whilst we jet off to France. Jake is around to deal with any emergencies with it if needs be.. I’m sure he can rinse out the Blow off bottle if it gets a little excited.

The experiment with the Frozen Yeast culture, well what can I say , I left it a little late, the WLP001 was just getting underway and the airlock had just started to pressurise as the Wort was ready, so As well as it, I put in the sachet of MangroveJacks West Coast dried yeast. next time I’ll start with an initial small starter about a week in advance and build it up. So it looks like it could be a feasible practice. Just don’t rush it.

I managed to get the CAD for the Front Panel for the replacement Particle Powered BrewPi  into a near completed state, so it’ll be ready for cutting and etching when back at work after my holiday.

I have been getting to grips with LibreCAD to get a new front panel Laser cut from perspex . All I need to do now is get the BrewPi  logo on there…

I have also been doing a bit more building of my own spark shields which behave like Version 2 of Elco’s shield.
I have noticed the bug that Elco has tracked down to the Wakeup pin config and also some sligtly odd behaviour at powerup which I think is to do with filtering as both the Beer and Fridge temperatures are filtered but the room is not.

After an agonising wait for another display to replace the non touch version that I mistakenly ordered, I paid over that odds for one from a local supplier but I have had another wait for a replacement display, as mentioned in my previous post the display wasn’t responding to touch…When the replacement arrived everything sprang into life almost as expected..

Since Elco’s announcement that they would soon stop supporting the Arduino version of the BrewPi, I have altered my plans from just building up a HERM’s controller to changing over one of the two existing fermenter BrewPi’s to the spark version. I have already purchased a Particle Photon as there have been hints about requirements for more code space for Wifi implementation for the photon but no WiFi for the core !
The BrewPi spark even though its under 1 year since release has seen Version 2 of the shield  and is released with an extra control output making it very versatile by itself and even more versatile when you start adding the 1-wire SSR expanders.

As I am now building two Particle based Brewpi Sparks, I have been getting both my PCB’s to the same build state where component availability allows, last night I came across a bug with the core build of version 0.2.11 firmware. If I hadn’t already verified the hardware  worked with a rudimentary test app built using the builder on Particles site I would have been worried. Pin A0 isn’t being implemented properly with the core build , the pin works as expected on the particle build running ver 0.2.11 (tested by swapping out to the same shield.)

Now let me find something on my mac to produce a DXF file that the Works Laser cutter can take to cut a replacement front panel….

and Finally..  my thanks to Elco and the BrewPi developers for a great project. Even though the arduino powered BrewPi will soon be archived it’ll still be used as a fermentation device on one of my fridges until the silicon wears out.. 🙂
thanks again for interesting times ahead with the HERMS setup that I know will be just around the corner…
Cheers