If you love to homebrew but live in an area where summer temperatures get too hot for proper fermentation you can resolve yourself to wait to brew or you can build a badass Arduino Nano-controlled UberFridge which will maintain temperatures set to a tenth of a degree and can be monitored or controlled using a custom webapp. If you have a spare working fridge the build will cost around $100 in parts.


Netherlands-based Electronics hacker Elco Jacobs designed the UberFridge as summer temperatures in his city are hot enough to ruin batches of homebrew. By adding two temperature sensors (one for the beer, one for the fridge) to a Arduino Nano that controls the climate with an algorithm designed by Jacobs. Current data can be found on an LED display on the fridge or from a webapp that gets information from a USB connection going from the Arduino to a DD-WRT linux-enabled wireless router.

If you're serious about your beercraft, this should be a great weekend project. The ideal fermentation temperature for most beers is 65 degrees Fahrenheit and unless you have a basement it may be hard to find those temperatures during the summer unless you go crazy with your air conditioning. Full schematics of the build, tutorials on how to link the various systems, and the open source code for the UberFridge webapp can all be found at the source link below.


UberFridge | Elco Jacobs via Hack-A-Day