Das Brewmeister!

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Revision as of 10:43, 26 February 2006 by 24.9.83.253 (talk)
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Project Scope

Description:
This is an attempt to mimic the control systems used in comercial brewing of beer. It has been done before with some external hardware and a refrigerator + heat lamp see:

http://www.blug.linux.no/files/presentations/freebeer/paper.pdf

My approach would be similar I think I may be able to get by with modifications to Spark Fun's toaster controller and a "cluged" together wireless temp sensor. I have prototyped in a breadboard a 16F88 with the DS18S20 one wire digital temperature sensor and one of Spark Fun's old Smirf's. Proto board passes data fine, even wrote a quick VB program to dump data in to Access for later.


PCB Conversion

I thought that the conversion would be relatively simple. Just take what I had and draw, right? I used the free Eagle setup and dumped everything to BatchPCB.com. A problem arose from changing to SMDs and trying to cut too many corners. I found out, after I had assembled a board, got bizzare voltage readings and no response from the pic,that the SMD voltage regulator I had put on the new PCB required a capacitor on the ouput. I wanted to keep the components to a minimum and didn't include everything from the prototype when I drew up the design. I will be more aware next time.


Coming Later?

I hope to have the new PCB in the next few weeks and if everything goes well I begin to look more closely at the reflow controller and procurement of a refrigerator. Meantime I need to find the time to actually begin brewing some beer!