i am looking at setting up a micropub with a brew on the premises element to it. As I am not exactly awash with money at the moment, cheap and cheerful is a must until it is off the ground at least.
I am planning on using my current 50L two pot system and upgrading to a 3 pot HERMS with auto mashing and the like, and to use a botnet of Brewpi controlled chest freezers to ferment and condition my brews.
I was wondering as I have a spare linux box kicking about could I use that to control my army of freezers rather than buying a Pi for each one?
I am thinking, set up a virtual machine for each freezer, install brewpi on the VM’s and I should be away.
I have I missed a trick here or would this work? I would still prefer for each Freezer to have its own controller for stability, any thoughts?
BrewPi has two parts: the Raspberry Pi and the microcontroller. The microcontroller is either an Arduino or a Spark/Photon board. Each freezer would need its own microcontroller but you could use your Linux box instead of the Raspberry Pi to talk to all the microcontrollers. You wouldn’t need to set up VMs.
I use the Arduino so am not familiar with the Spark/Photon version. It’s possible that this does or will support multiple fermentation chambers.
I’ve got sucessfully set up combination of three chambers on single RPi 2 with supercap UPS (DIY PCB with autoshutdown).
Two arduinos (DIY PCB shield) and one photon (also DIY PCB shield).
For setting up RPi I was using this instructable with some modifications.
I’m using these controllers for home mead brewery with really nice results.
If you want I can upload schematics of PCBs and whole image of RPi.