BrewBlox Tilt Service

You can do that, yeh. Though unless your fridge is thick metal, you should be able to get a signal from outside of it. I’ve found that signal can sometimes depend on the current orientation of the tilt floating around in the beer. You might find it comes good after a bit.

Perfect. Well at least I can rule out the config of my pi and the service. More testing with signal strength and placement I think. Just on that - is there some way of showing the device raw in terminal so I can move it to an optimal position ?

There is, but I’m not sure off the top of my head. One other thing, are you running brewblox on the standard ports?

Sorry. Other things have popped in my head. Is brewblox itself up to date? Are you running any other services that may be using the old eventbus interface?

Yes. All out of the box config

I ran a full update and restart plus flashed the spark as part of the diagnostics. The pi does have rhasspy on it tho so I was wondering if there were any shared services causing an issue. They are all containerised so will add that to the troubleshooting checks later. Once thing i was wondering about is the docker network which I have had issues with previously having probs with local host and had to set the docker ip explicitly to get the nodes connecting

Thanks for the info - it very much helped with the fault finding. I have solved the problem which as you stated was a signal strength issue.

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Ahhhhh poop ! Tilt has stopped logging on the pi and still showing on my iPhone. Looks like plan b is needed to ensure a more reliable connection. I was wondering if simply connecting a Bluetooth usb dongle to a usb extender would work ? I really don’t fancy spending £90 on a tilt repeater.

I haven’t tested with a USB dongle, tbh. The potential issue is the script might just hook onto the first bluetooth device it finds which could be the on-board one. It might just work. It might not.

Just to check, is it possible to try a different position for your raspi? Fridges often have radiators in the sides and back but not at the top/front. You might find placing the pi where there isn’t a radiator in the way gets a better signal.

That is strange. I have a stainless steel SS Brewtech Brew Bucket, which is in a tall fridge, the Pi is mounted on the wall above the back of the fridge. Total distance from the Tilt to Pi is approximately 1.5 metres and seem to have no problem with signal strength. It might be worth seeing if a different placement would help. Maybe try placing to the side, or above or similar.

The Pi does not have to be very close to the Spark if that helps as it can communicate wirelessly. So this should not be a constraint for Pi placement if that makes it easier.

Thanks for the info. That’s really good to know… I am about to cold crash the brew in the fermenter so in a couple of days I can have a play with placement. I note the iPhone app shows signal strength so that might help. Also the pi 4 has a large heatsink which might attenuate the signal further. I did order a cheap usb BT dongle so that might help … will report back with findings. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

@j616s - I just wanted to give some more feedback on this.

The Tilt service has worked flawlessly for my last couple of brews! The only slight problem I had was after he most recent update where some of the compose changes which were required for earlier versions of this caused me some issues.

Thanks again for all your work on this.

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Good evening all,

I am seeing something strange in the logs for my tilt and wondering if anyone had an answer.

I have just rebuilt my RPi4 and installed both brewblox and the tilt service. Both installs went smoothly.

However,I am not seeing the tilt in the graph. According to the logs ( docker logs brewblox_tilt_1) the tilt appears to be found (purple).

But then after that I see repeated lines of the following " Error when publishing data ConnectionError('Publish error=“The client is not currently connected.”

Any pointers would be grateful received

Cheers

Could you please run brewblox-ctl log?

Here is the output of the brewblox-ctl log

https://termbin.com/fa1x

Nothing really stands out in your logs, except that there are connection errors.

You can try running brewblox-ctl disable-ipv6 to solve some weird interactions between Docker and IPv6.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, swap in the mosquitto broker.
Edit your docker-compose.yml file, and under services, add:

  eventbus:
    image: brewblox/mosquitto:${BREWBLOX_RELEASE}

Your docker-compose.yml file should look like:

services:
  eventbus:
    image: brewblox/mosquitto:${BREWBLOX_RELEASE}
  spark-one:
    command: --name=spark-one --mdns-port=${BREWBLOX_PORT_MDNS}
    image: brewblox/brewblox-devcon-spark:${BREWBLOX_RELEASE}
    labels:
    - traefik.port=5000
    - 'traefik.frontend.rule=PathPrefix: /spark-one'
    privileged: true
    restart: unless-stopped
  tilt:
    image: j616s/brewblox-tilt:latest
    network_mode: host
    privileged: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
    - ./tilt:/share
version: '3.7'

Thanks for the quick response. Followed your advice, disabled ipv6 and added the line to the docker compose file.

Rebooted the system and then ran brewblox-ctl log.

https://termbin.com/6d7c

Will be away for weekend but will pick this up on my return

Thanks for you continued support
Cheers

Enjoy your weekend!

When you’re back, I’d suggest looking through your dmesg and /var/log/syslog output. Configuration looks fine, and the next most likely suspect is the network stack.
Feel free to post logs if they contain too much abracadabra.

Update:

have just checked and the tilt is now showing on the graph screen. Will let it run over the weekend. I have the ability to remotely access the system, so will check periodically.

Normally I am quiet good with abracadabra or more affectionately in this house bibil de dibilbil langauge…

Cheers

Once again thanks.

Sorry if this isn’t the best thread for this. Now that I have the tilt service working (thank you for this very useful software @j616s) , I wondered if it’s possible to display gravity data on on the Spark 3.

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