Which Guide Should I be Using for Set-UP?

1

BrewPi Team–

I just received my BrewPi and will be setting it up over the next few days. What should I use as a step by step setup guide? I’m slightly confused as there are a couple of different “guides” spread throughout the brewpi site.

  1. The first one is located under “Documentation” in “Software Installation:”

http://brewpi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

In the first paragraph it talks about the Arduino, which makes me think it’s not current.

  1. This one is located in the “Community” under “Software Install Guide:”

The issue with this one is that when you get to “configuration” is just says “currently writing.”

Which one should I refer to? It would be really helpful if you guys could make a comprehensive user manual that includes both set-up and install.

Thanks,

Will

2

The software install guide on the community is better.

When that’s done and you are up to date (firmware 0.4.4), you can continue with setting up your devices in device manager.
You’ll can add a:

  • Fridge sensor (chamber device, chamber temp)
  • Beer sensor (beer 1, beer temp)
  • Room sensor (chamber device, room temp). This is just for logging.
  • Chamber heater
  • Chamber cooler
    On the Spark you’ll want your actuators to be non-inverted.

The documentation needs work. I’ll open a new topic for that.

3

Great, thanks! Really appreciate the quick response.

Separate issue here–
When I received my brewpi, I thought I was missing the particle photon, which I quickly realized was actually located inside the brewpi! Well, I was so excited to get everything set up this weekend that I ordered another one before I made this realization. Soon after I made this mistake I sent an email to your sales and customer service team to cancel my order. However, it looks like the order went through. Is it possible to cancel or return this item and be refunded for the shipping?

4

Hi Will,

The order did not ship yet. I will cancel the photon order.

Elco

5

Thanks Elco! Feeling better about the setup. There’s a ton of knowledge here on the forum and I can see that you really take care of your customers.

6

I gather that since wiki.brewpi.com and brewpi.readthedocs.io are both hosts that don’t resolve, the brewpi installation guide has deliberately been taken offline… in favour of brewblox? The ironic thing is all I really want is the Particle Photon flash script and it’s turned into this King Lear situation LOL… I had it in mind to use fermentrack, but I have Photons and I don’t think that’ll work… I’ve made a giant mess.

If brewblox can use Arduinos, ESP8266 and Photons for controllers, I will happily give it a go.

7

The BrewBlox guide is at https://brewblox.netlify.app

The Arduino version of BrewPi is no longer maintained since 2015, the photon version is also end-of-life.
We are not supporting those platforms and the docs were outdated, which is why I took them offline.

The BrewBlox firmware assumes a BrewPi Spark and is not friendly to DIY boards. For a still maintained version of BrewPi Arduino, I refer you to brewpi-remix.

For flashing a photon, I recommend using particle-cli, which is what we do inside the docker container too.

8

Hi Elco,
Since I have the photon version of brewpi spark with a raspberry v1, my understanding is that I can’t make it works with BrewBlox. I ran into issue with the raspberry and don’t have the old software anymore and therefore can’t setup my brewpi. What are my options to make my system works again.
Thanks

9

The photon is good, the pi 1 too slow. The minimum requirement is a pi 2, but a newer version will run smoother.

If it was confusing before: the BrewPi software is end of life, not the boards with a photon. We support all the way back to the spark 1, with the only caveat that for the oldest spark the spark core module needs to be swapped for a photon.

10

My slow brain start to get it…
BrewPi Spark 1 -> Spark core (ran on BrewPi software)
BrewPi Spark 2 -> Photon core (run on BrewBlox)
BrewPi Spark 3 -> Photon core (run on BrewBlox)

I now know I have the Spark 1 with Spark core and Raspberry Pi v1. Is my only option to swap core for photon and upgrade my Pi? Can I just re-install the old BrewPi software on my old Pi and ran it just as I did (and worked for me) a while ago? By saying the BrewPi software is at its “end-of-life”, does it means actually “dead” and unavailable anymore?

I’m all keen about the upgrade eventually, but I just wish I could’ve make it work now, in the mean time, just as it did in the past. I just need a steady temp fermentation.

Anyway thanks for take the time.

11

The BrewPi software being end-of-life means that it may work, or it won’t. We no longer perform maintenance to ensure it works on current versions of Pi/Raspberry Pi OS/browsers.

If you still have an old Pi (installed with Raspbian Jessie) hanging around, you can probably get it to work without much fuss. If you’d install the latest version of Raspbian, you immediately run into issues with BrewPi using PHP5, which is no longer available.