Intro

For those that don’t know, BrewPi is the answer to modern man’s problem of controlling Beer fermentation temperature. Originally, it was a Raspberry Pi coupled with an Arduino (and more currently a Photon Spark). The Arduino (or Spark) acts as the work horse of the operation by measuring temperature and controlling heat and/or cooling for the fermentation chamber. The Raspberry Pi would act as a web server, displaying information and sending commands to the Arduino (or Spark). The creators of the project have also kindly posted their code in git hub https://github.com/BrewPi.

WTF Are you trying to do? The thing works already!

What I would like to do is remove the Arduino and still have a functioning setup. Initially, this looks like it might take some time and thought. I want to do this as a learning experiment. There is no intention on sabotaging the efforts of the BrewPi team. They rightfully deserve credit and I have the utmost respect for them and the product they have created.

With all that out of the way, I have come up with a few ideas of how I can make a stand alone BrewPi out of the Raspberry Pi (3):

  • Understand the Arduino/Spark code and rewrite into python code (or something else, i.e. bash) to run in an infinite loop on the pi
  • Create wrapper code around the existing firmware and simulate on the pi
  • Something else?
  • Forget the whole thing and go buy an Arduino

So Whats Next?

Not much besides delving into the BrewPi git hub repo and trying to figure out how the darn thing works. So far, I have learned about the PID algorithm and am currently figuring out how its implemented in the BrewPi. (Note: I have a Computer Science background and not one in electronics or control theory). Hopefully there will be more status updates to come.

This will be the Last post EVER!