Sunday, July 7, 2013

Fermenting Beer with a Netduino, Electric IMP and a Windows 8 App

After my new years resolution, I’ve brewed up a number of batches of beer (primarily IPA’s)WP_20130315_001 for my kegerator. Most turned out relatively good but as summer arrived in Florida it was a little difficult to keep my wort at around 70 degrees during the fermentation process. 

So I ended up investing in a freezer from Lowes for about $200 and added custom controller built from an Electric IMP, Netudino that  uploads data to a cool service called Xively.

The freezer will maintain a consistent temperature of 70 +/-1 degree, perfect for fermenting most ales. 

Here’s a screen capture from my LagoVista home automation app that shows a live capture at 30 second intervals as to the temperature in my fermenter.

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And here’s some pix on the actual controller and unit itself, note the “up-to-code” wiring SmileSomeday I might get around to putting some sort of enclosure around this.

 

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This is inside the fermentation chamber.  Note the little gray wire, that has a thermistor on the end that provide variable resistor output where we can measure the voltage and determine the temperature.

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If you’d like more info as to how to build one of these things yourself, drop me an email at kevinw@slsys.net.

As an added bonus my controller was a few feet away from my HVAC unit in the garage so I added a couple extra thermistors to to monitor the incoming and outgoing temperatures for the cooling unit. The full feed can be viewed here

https://xively.com/develop/XXKkf_vy-StrfD_YGml7

-twb

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