I understand Brewpiless now supports auto-spunding using a pressure transducer and solenoid. Is there any support for this in brewblox? Would it be an easy port across? Seems crazy to go to Piless when I have a spark and pi…
Basically I want to be able to intergrate an ispindel and a spunding valve. I would start ferment with very little pressure and increase as the ferment continues finally capping it to start carbonation in the conical (PRV as a backup). I would also like to set my temp profile based on the ispindel readings rather than time. e.g. ramp up temp slightly for last few points, cold crash after x amount of time @ FG etc.
Are either of these features currently supported or planned to be?
Can anyone tell me if it’s possible to load brewpiless on a spark then or would I need to scrap everything and get a ESP826 Wifi board?
I would have thought porting this feature would have been easy enough. Also surprised that there is no interest in pressure control or setting temp profiles based on gravity. These two features would allow full control of fermentation and are available on the “spec’d down” version of your software. Is it a hardware limitation or just lack of interest?
Brewpi-less is based on an older fork of BrewPi and will have less possibilities than brewblox.
The Spark has no analog inputs, so reading a pressure sensor should be done by an external board, which can communicate with the Spark over RS485. The RS485 bus is meant to communicate with any external boards with their own microcontroller. If you can add an RS485 transceiver to your board and support Modbus, we can make it work.
However, I have been working on a pressure sensor interface for a long time and I’m in the final stages of prototyping. So there is definitely interest. I am aiming for extreme precision though, and have put in over 2000 hours to reduce drift, temperature sensitivity and noise. I have gone through many redesigns. This has been a pet project for years. My biggest project next to the Brewblox platform.
If I can reach a precision of a few microbar, which looks to be possible, 2 pressure sensors can be used to also measure fermentation progress. I think I can do my first tests while fermenting beer this month.
Thanks for the reply. I’m really keen on this so I will watch with great interest.
The precision of a 60 psi (0-5v) pressure transducer would likely be more than enough for what I need but sounds like what you are doing will be extremely precise.
I am testing with 700mbar (10 psi) sensor right now, which can handle pressure up to 20 psi without damage. The large range of the sensor is needed for robustness, which makes measuring water level changes of a few micrometers challenging
