Hi there,
I have been off from BrewPi and its development for quite a while - opening a microbrewery consumes quite a bit of time, it seems 
Anyway I was wondering if I could switch our fermentation controllers with BrewPi - however, I’d need to control several fermentors at once. Is this possible nowadays? 
Best regards
Lukas
Currently only with multiple BrewPi Sparks. You can use one Raspberry Pi to interface with multiple Sparks though.
We are going to support this in the next generation of our software, which is coming soon (1-2 months)…
Hi Elco,
great! Does that mean that one single BrewPi (3) with one Raspberry will be able to handle multiple fermentors, or would I need one BrewPi per fermentor?
Thanks
Lukas
Yes, one Spark will be able to handle multiple processes.
So, knowing you stand to sell more hardware depending on your answer, would you recommend holding out for a month or two or buying second hardware for a second fermenter to be resold when a stable release is out several months or more down the road?
The other thing to keep in mind is how close your fermenters will be. The RJ12 cables for sensors etc can’t be too long. I know for myself it’s nice to dedicate a single BrewPi display per fermenter and I imaging this will be more the case in a microbrewery setup. I guess it will depend a little bit on how the display interface is designed for the rework.
That’s a good point. In my case, in a 5 gallon basement brewery all my fermentation equipment is within a 4’ area but in the OPs situation it would likely be much, much further.
Right, the sensors would have to be connected with a relatively long wire (about 6-8meters), the alternative being some hanging cables between the fermentors. A single BrewPi per fermentor wouldn’t be too bad, but I really like having the readouts all in one place, so that one has to check the values in one place instead of running through the fermenting cellar
If it is so far apart, I think it would be nice (and less sensitive to errors) to have a Spark for each fermenter which also gives you a display on each fermenter.
They will all connect to a single server and all your brewing data and charts will be displayed on a single dashboard.
Elco, nearly done with my brewing rewiring to PID control and was wondering if the upcoming fermenter release if still tied to docker? I was getting ready to give another try to getting my SPARC 3s updated and my Raspberry Pi to the pi-docker install completed but waiting to hear on the update.
Thanks,
Mike
Been waiting for this over 3 years now. I gave away all my BrewPis in the meantime.
Got them back since it was too complicated to the brewers I gave them. They were catching dust during the last year, but now with the release of BrewBlox it’s time to dig them out again.