Thank you for BrewBlox!

General
1

I finally took a leap of faith and migrated from my trusty BrewPi setup to BrewBlox in between two fermentations, mostly because I couldn’t edit temperature profiles in BrewPi any more.

And I justed wanted to say thank you. The entire installation, setup and configuration of BrewBlox worked flawlessly. Yesterday’s imperial stout is happily fermenting away at a constant 19 degrees right now with almost no tweaking needed.

I am very impressed by the complexity and freedom of BrewBlox, and the possibilities it gives the user. I am also a bit overwhelmed. :wink:

Keep up the good work!

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2

Thanks for taking the time to say this :slight_smile:

Freedom and flexibility was exactly the goal in creating this new platform. Managing the complexity that comes with it is the biggest challenge. The wizards help with setting up basic configurations, but still, there are a lot of moving parts and building blocks.

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3

How much work was the upgrade? I really need to upgrade my 2-Spark, 2-Fermenter BrewPi setup. I bought a new RPI for it but haven’t gotten around to installing and configuring everything.

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Actually, it was quite straightforward. The installation procedure from the documentation worked like a charm, I just had to change the Brewblox http ports because I still had brewpi running on port 80. The most difficult step was understanding the concepts behind Brewblox, but thanks to the fridge wizard, the initial setup was also easy.

I installed brewblox the day before I brewed an RIS that needed to go in the fridge and had no complications. Luckily. :slight_smile:

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Are there updates to the Spark(s) required that would prevent going back?

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You could flash BrewPi again, but you shouldn’t want to.

We are working really hard on BrewBlox and have not updated BrewPi for a long time. BrewPi will not be updated and will not be supported in the future, while BrewBlox will continue to improve.

If BrewBlox is not working for you, we should address that instead of sticking with BrewPi. BrewBlox is miles ahead of BrewPi in what it can do by now.

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I had planned to make this my first-weekend-of-corona-virus-lockdown project and really I had it migrated to where I could have used it by the end of Friday evening. I had been using two Spark 3 units for 2 fermenters so Saturday I moved the second fermenter to the first Spark and played around with Tilt integration and scripting to remove bad points the Tilt service is logging.

Next up is finding a small monitor I can use for a status screen in my fermentation area. My old Fire tablet won’t load the new UI, even in Chrome–not that the small screen would be readable anyway. Thinking maybe something like a 15.6" portable monitor will work.

Thanks for the nudge for me to get it done.

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Happy that we can be of use during this lockdown!

A 15 inch monitor should be fine as a status monitor. Mobile devices and other small screens are supported, but it is likely that an old tablet is still running an older, and not supported version of chrome.

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This one is a Fire 7. Even the old UI would result in an Aw Snap error after a while. The TiltPi UI was pretty stable but Google Sheets was a disaster. I think Chrome is updating but the Fire tablets are seriously under powered and it seems like Amazon is starting to break things that I’ve loaded from the Google store (which has to be side-loaded and is not a supported configuration.) I have have a Fire 8 I use more often and a couple apps where I can’t even log in but they work just fine on my iPhone. Its time to move off that platform. The 15" monitor running off a Pi would probably be perfect. Perhaps even the same Pi could be used?

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It could indeed be an issue with required cpu/memory. The UI essentially is an application that happens to run in your browser.

Whether you can run the display on the Pi depends on the model. A Pi 2 definitely won’t, but a Pi 3 or 4 should be able to.
It’s something that we generally describe as “possible, but not immediately recommended”. Using a second, dedicated Pi for the display will put significantly less stress on the server Pi and its SD card.

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Makes sense. They are cheap enough to not worry about it.

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Hi guys, I have an old Brewpi Spark bought in early 2015! I didn’t get to use it for a while now and trying to put it back on service. Will it be compatible with BrewBlox?

Thanks

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If it has a photon, yes. If it still has a spark core, you can swap it for a photon.

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Mmh… I guess I’m quite confused and really know what I have… I thought I had the photon, being a prior version to the spark. Apparently not… How can i figure this out? I bought that brewpi in March 2015. What would that be?

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@Mathieu_Barabe Maybe this thread helps you. I was in the same situation. Swapping in a photon was easy and solved the issue.

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Thank @psychodad! That’s definitely helpful.
I understand it’s as simple as swapping two boards… no soldering involved. I have to say, I did give a quick attempt to open the BrewPi case and thought it was holding up pretty good and certainly breaking it! :slight_smile: then I envisage a painful process and stopped :smiley: Anyway. Thanks for the help.

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@Mathieu_Barabe Happy to help! In the post Opening BrewPi Spark Case Elco describes how to open the old spark case. No worries, it’s not easy to break.

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I’m a fairly new user to this new platform as well coming from BrewPi/Arduino. This one is way better once you get used to how different things are in the new setup. I think it will be easier for new folks using this platform instead of us old BrewPi users since there will be nothing new folks have to “un-learn”. I’ve done 3 (I think) brews now on it and it works great after I got out of my own way in using Linux…:-).

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