Long time BrewPi user here.
My first brew in 8months was yesterday and before that I installed brewblox on my rp3 and spark v2
On brewpi the temperature regulation was spot on. Never overshooted and just was on point.
I’m now about 6 hours in the fermentation and I don’t find it to be as spot on and I find it to power the fridge seldom and for a short period
Are my settings correct?
I have 80 Liters of beer inside a conical, and that conical is in a large fridge.
Beer sensor is inside a thermowell in the conical and the fridge temp is in a 0.5L water bottle inside the fridge
I just want the beer to stay at 19°c
It’s not uncommon to have to tweak settings a bit. 80L is somewhat more than what is assumed by the default settings.
For this, the PID values are used. Could you please go to the PID heater / cooler blocks (you can click on the frost/flame icons), and then in their actions menu open and screenshot their graphs?
These graphs will show how much P/I/D contributed to the total output.
You can then disable the Ferment Heat PID block to deactivate the heater side of things. A heat/cool only wizard is on our backlog, but can’t give any ETA on that.
If you click on the three dots in the top right corner, you get the option to open the graph fullscreen.
Edit: you could start with increasing the Kp somewhat, to about -70. For this scenario, you’d want a P and D of ~0, with I solely being responsible for keeping temperature.
I guess that 200 is too much.
Is the most important figure of fine tuning on the graph “D”. That is getting it close to zero.
After I changed K to -200 it started swinging alot
P, I, and D all have equally important uses. In a stable situation like this, you’d want I to have a stable >0 value, and P/D to be fairly quiet.
In temperature steps (eg. you set setpoint to 15 degC) you expect to see P leading, and D adding dampening when the temperature gets close to setpoint.
Temperature looks good, but control is indeed somewhat swingy. May indeed try reducing Kp somewhat, and see where that ends up.
Hi Bob,
I am still running fermentation with Spark v2 and firmware version 0.5.4. I am currently testing most recent version of BrewBlox on a Raspberry PI 4/model B/8GB. Is it recommendable to update Spark v2 from version 0.5.4 from within BrewBlox, and still be sure to control the fridge afterward without running into issues?
Wow, Thanks for quick reply!
Does the Wizardry build up the control chain to control the fridge heating and cooling? And will my wiring and solid states relay for cooling and heating remain un changed?
How to use the fields included in the spark one device? and how do you initiate readings from the connected temperature sensors to a dashboard or brewery?
Hi Bob
Thanks for your reply. Everything works fine on graphing temperatures.
I have just been drawing a simple non automated RIMS brewery. The tool works excellent. How do you add temperature displays to the “Brewery”?
on a Raspberry PI 4/model B/8GB. Is it recommendable to update Spark v2 from version 0.5.4 from within BrewBlox, and still be sure to control the fridge afterward without running into issues?
