March 19, 2020 Episode

There are so many open-source projects you can find out there when that revolve around homebrewing. From some of the topics, we have discussed on the show like Fermentrack and CraftBeerPI. There is a ton of projects you could be using today to help improve your brewing.

Here is a list of the project I talk about in today’s show:

CraftBeerPI: http://web.craftbeerpi.com/

Brewbubbles: https://docs.brewbubbles.com/en/latest/index.html

RaspberryPints: http://raspberrypints.com/

Fermentrack: http://fermentrack.com/

BrewTarget: http://www.brewtarget.org/

iSpindel: http://www.ispindel.de/docs/README_en.html

StrangeBrew: https://dougedey.github.io/SB_Elsinore_Server/

Brewpi Remix: https://www.brewpiremix.com/

BrewPiLess:https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess

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Music:

Intro Music: SUNBIRDS by BOCrew (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/BOCrew/38854 Ft: THEDEEPR / THECORNER / feat : FORENSIC

Not enough Horsefeathers by Fireproof_Babies (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Fireproof_Babies/13115 Ft: duckett, kulimu

Paper Planes – Durden ft. Airtone by DURDEN (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/DURDEN/55041 Ft: Airtone

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Kalte Ohren by Alex (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/59612 Ft: starfrosch & Jerry Spoon

Scrubber Duckys Ad Music:

Music:

Jeff II – Liquid Demons

Link to the song: https://youtu.be/UkRIKiBJ5Oc

Show Transcript (A.I. Driven There will be errors)

Colter Wilson: You know, there are a ton of different open source projects out there that have to do with homebrewing. And we’ve covered a few, like for men, track the ice spindle brew, pie remix. Those have all been dedicated shows. But today I want to talk about open source brewing in general and how to find maybe a project for something that you’re looking to solve.

And that’s what we’re going to cover today on Homebrew DIY.

And welcome back to homebrewing DIY, the podcast, the covers, the do it yourself aspect of homebrewing gadgets, contraptions and parts. This show covers it all. Today on the show, we’re going to talk about open source homebrewing. The different projects that are out there that you can find to solve some of the problems that you might be having in your brewery.

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So it’s been kind of a crazy week for home brewing. I did get my hazy IPA tapped and it tastes amazing. I have to say that this is the first hazy IPA that I’ve made that is really turned out. I get that really nice, soft ballfield feel that you’re really looking for, and a really. Killer, juicy hop flavor and aroma.

It’s, it’s really turned out to be great. I have to say, one of the things that I think I did write on this beer was I did a zero oxygen transfer from my fermentor into a keg using a lid that I had made where I attached the ball lock on top of my fermentor later. It’s finally working. I’ve got everything all sealed up and working properly.

Uh, pretty excited that that worked. Also had a pretty cool little project that we did today, which was we had a happy hour virtually on Google Hangouts with some of our patrons. I met clay, who actually has been to one of our Homebrew club meetings. So it was great to talk to you again, clay. And today for the first time I met Ian and Kenny.

Who have been patrons for a couple of months and it was really great to meet both of you guys. I had a great time having a conversation, learning about some of the beers that you make, some of the things you have in plan, some of the things you’ve built and haven’t built, and it was really great to even see some of your kids.

I had a great time on the, on the, on the happy hour and. We’re definitely going to do it again. So pretty excited and it was really fun. Well, I think now that we’re done with announcements, what we’ll do is we’re going to hop right into our topic for today, which is open source homebrewing.

What we’re going to do this week is we’re going to do a deep dive into open source homebrewing. I did actually have a guest lined up for this week, but because of the events kind of going on in the world, just having an interview for a home brewing podcast was not really in the cards so. We will definitely get a reschedule on what we were going to talk about this week, but in all reality, I’m really excited to talk about today’s subject.

What we’re gonna talk about today is open source homebrewing, and what we’ll talk about in today’s deep dive. Just as a quick outline is we’ll start with what is open source and what does it mean. Let’s assume that the person listening to this podcast doesn’t even know what we’re talking about. What are some really cool projects out there that are based on open source software or hardware and what are some good resources in finding your own projects?

If you have a problem you want to solve and seeing if there might be an open source project out there to solve it. So I think that that is a really great topic for today. So let’s just get started. First of all, let’s talk a bit about what is open source now. There’s. A couple of different types of free in the world.

Let’s, let’s, let’s start with that. There’s like Gmail free as in you get Gmail for free, but in the end you still pay for it. You pay for it with your data. You pay for it through advertising. That is the, we give you a product for free, but in all reality, you then become the product in the open source world.

That’s not the case with open source. It’s, it’s actually kind of one of the most hippie things out there on the internet is that you bring together a community. That community works together to solve a problem, and all of the code that that project is built upon is free to use in any way that you see fit.

You’re also. Not able to make money specifically from selling the program. So for example, if I were to write a rope, an open source mail email program, I’m not able to actually sell the email program. I could sell services in supporting the program, but I could not actually sell the program itself because the software itself is free and open source.

When you look at open source software, you can usually find the actual source code for the project itself. Out in the open, you can read it, you can check it, and there’s some really big benefits to having a project be open source. One of, for me, one of the big benefits right out the gate is security because the code, the code is actually free and open and people can look at it.

People can see where there’s flaws and bugs in the security and have it fixed quickly. It’s kind of weird where it shows like, Hey, here’s the code, here’s all of our vulnerabilities. But when people can see all of those vulnerabilities, it allows people to go in and fix things and be able to get them patched and solved quickly.

When it comes to homebrewing, there are ton of home brewing based open source projects out there, and some of them are. Software products I can use. An example is the uh, brew pie. The, the first version of the brew pie is an open source software. It’s also got the open source hardware, which is, it was based on the Ardwino and the Arduino itself is actually an open source piece of hardware.

You could actually go by all of the through hole through hole components on like a Chinese website. And a prototyping board and actually build an Arduino from scratch and it would actually work. That being said, it wouldn’t necessarily be the prettiest thing, and it would probably be larger than a.

Factory made Arduino, but the idea is that the components used in it and the designs for the border open source. That’s why you can go to Ali express or you can go to another website and you can actually find easily find different brands of Arduino UNOS and those types of boards because the patent is actually set to be an open source product.

I think the next thing I want to talk about is really just where to find different open source products. One of the first places that I would find them, and this is all the way back in 2014 when I started diving into these types of projects, would be homebrewer talk. There’s the Homebrew talk format forums.

There’s a big DIY section in there, and in that DIY section, there’s a lot of different pro projects out there, and. The original brew pie thread. If you listened to my older show where I talked to Lee UC and we talk about the brew pie, they talk about the, the gigantor mega thread in Homebrew talk for the brew pie, and this was a thread that was made for the original group high set up and.

It doesn’t really work anymore. If you were to try to do it. Things have now kind of progressed to where they are and the only supported Arduino based. Brew pie set up currently is actually the brew pie remix because the original maker Elko, uh, over, he’s now moved on to using the spark microcontroller instead of the art.

We know microcontroller for space and reasons, and he’s now converting it into a full brewery type of system, whereas the software will still and is still open source. But the hardware itself is now become a much. Bigger thing. And so you would purchase the hardware from Elko to build your brew block system, but the software you install on it would still be an open source product.

I digress. Let’s, let’s get back into where you might find one. So. Thinking about that. If you go to Homebrew talk, you can, you could search through there and find different projects and there’s a few people that are out there that you’ll find that are actually specifically making these projects. Like for example, Lee Bussy that we talked to on the show, I believe it was episode six he would be, if you, if you followed him on Homebrew talk, he’s going to be an active user.

Talking about all these different projects and he’s somebody that you could follow and know, kind of be in the know at least on that website and figure out what projects are out there. The other places you can look is on get hub. It’s pretty easy to go into get hub and do a search for homebrewing, and you’re going to find a ton of different software projects all in different phases of where they are in their readiness to be, to be used in the wild.

But the idea is that if you are pretty smart with some software and you could dig in, you could probably find a cool project out there. Another good place to look is just in general, if you, if you do some searches on Reddit, like the homebrewing section on Reddit, there’s a lot of different projects that will pop up in there from time to time, and that’s also a good place to find different projects.

Now let’s talk a bit about some of the projects that you’re going to see out there. I am not gonna in any way get into all of them. I’m going to talk about a few that I know about and what they do. And to be honest, the idea of this show is really to give you the tools to go out and find what you’re looking for for yourself.

So I think the first project we’re going to talk about is one that we’ve talked about a ton on this show, which is the brew pie. The root pie was originally a project. Back in 2012 I believe is when it started and yeah. It was an Arduino based temperature controller for fermentation chamber, and this piece of software is still to this day, very, very solid.

It does one thing really, really well. If you want more information specifically on the project, I highly recommend you going to my show with Lee Bussy or the ferment track show with John Beeler and we talk about. The history of the brew pie project in depth, but the reason I’m bringing it up today is that it is what is, there’s a lot of different fermentation temperature controllers out there today that are basically forks or spinoffs from the original group high project.

So. I think the first one I would look into, which is most closely related to the original bruv high project, is brew PI remix, which is. You could just go to brew pie, remix.com and get the documentation and all of the information you would need to build one. It’s still going to have your classic brew pie interface with some additional features to it, and it’s going to be a pretty fun project if you’re looking to set something up for a fermentation chamber.

The other spin off from that is for Ben track, which is the software that I use, and not to get into that because we’ve talked about it incessantly on this show, but also it is a spinoff from the original brew pie project and a fermentation control piece of software. The last one that I would get into, that’s also another one.

It’s a spin off from brew pie is called brew pie less. And so the idea is that it’s different in the other takes on brew pie cause the brew pie set up is actually where you have a microcontroller that actually runs the control script that operates the fermentation. Chamber itself and the brew pileus actually pulls back and removes that piece out and has the actual brew pie run off of the raspberry PI itself using the GPIO pins.

And so the idea behind that is that Hey, raspberry pies can be a really stable piece of hardware. And why have another. Piece of hardware in the mix when you really have something to control it that way. And if you Google brew pilos it, you’ll find the get hub repository and the information on building that.

And those three projects alone are all based off of the original brew PI controller. Another really cool project that actually was built and done by by a Lee Bussy. And funny. I, I need to have him back on the show cause I probably want to do a deeper dive on this project is called brew bubbles and brew puzzles is a piece of hardware that you can build and it’s completely open source and it’s about less, it’s less than $10 worth of hardware if you do it the cheap way, you gotta wait for some time for your parts to get here.

But it’s definitely inexpensive and you can actually take this. Piece of hardware, attach it to an S type, an S type air lock. And what it does is it tells you if there’s activity in your air lock or not. It’s not meant to give you like gravity readings or anything like that like a Plato does. But the idea is that it’s meant to tell you, Hey, there’s actually activity in your air lock and you don’t have to go out to your fermentation chamber to check it.

And it’s kind of a cool little project. And. Probably because of the price, not, not very hard to get into. It does have its own PCB board and there would be a little bit of soldering, but. Hey, that is kind of the idea behind these projects. Another one I would talk about is the ice spindle, which we’ve talked about on the show, and I’ve had an entire episode dedicated to it, and I would recommend you going back and listening to that as a deep dive.

But the ice spindle essentially is a open source version of the tilt hydrometer where you can take a. Set of parts based on the ESP 82 66 Mike, your microcontroller and some and a battery and in a whole bunch of other parts and you can solder together into a tube and be able to actually have a hydrometer that floats in your beer and gives you real time temperature and gravity readings.

I currently am in the process of trying to build my own. I’m actually in the process of starting over and waiting for some parts from China right now and. Now that the factories are firing back up there. I should see those in a few weeks. But yes, the ice spindle is a product is a project out there that is an open source project that you could get into to build this piece of hardware.

Another cool open source project that I personally use in my brewery is the raspberry pint software. And what raspberry pint is, is a digital beer menu. And it’s a piece of software that, uh, basically runs a web server on a raspberry PI, run it on a raspberry PI zero w and it’s attached to a television in my bar.

I’ll, I’ll take a picture of it and upload it to the show notes so you can see what it looks like. But the idea of raspberry pints is a digital. Menu for your tap list. So, or you could even do what’s what, what you have in bottles. If you have, let’s say two beers on tap and a beer on in the bottle, you could actually have that listed on your, on your list.

It does the orientation. You can do a sideways orientation of your screen so you can actually put more lists, more beers on your list. I actually just have a horizontal screen in my setup, but it’s completely up to you what you want the orientation to look like and it has some really cool icons for, you know, the beer.

It has cool icons for the IB use and you can put the ADV in their tasting notes and it’s just a really clean looking project. This project is a little dated at this point, and because it’s open source. People have made some attempts to update the software, so it does get support, but it’s really supported entirely by the community.

The original writer really has stopped contributing for the last few years, but the software to this day still works, and it’s a great way of getting a digital tablets up and running. Another project that we’ve talked about a ton on this show is the craft beer pie. And as you know, the craft beer pie is a brewery controllers.

So think of it this way. I want to create my own electric brewery from scratch. The old way was to buy these large control boxes with a lot of knobs and, and, and hardware, and the craft beer pie. Stepped into a place to where, Hey, you could buy a raspberry PI using the GPIO pins, and there’s actually a little bit of a, a board in the middle that they recommend that you use.

And then from there you can add all of your relays into a separate control box. And from there. Boom, you can, you can control all of your brewery from a web interface. It’s a really cool piece of software and it has a thriving community around it because they, you can build plugins to make the software have additional features.

So for example, with a craft beer pie set up, you can operate your mash. Get it up to a boil and run all of your hot site. You can even have it do your fermentation chamber and all of the cold side. And then even from there, they have different add ons to like add a machine to add your hops at certain points through the day.

Brew. I mean it, it does a lot of stuff. So the craft beer pie is not just a brewery controller. It’s kind of an entire open source ecosystem in itself. It’s almost becoming its own platform. So really a cool project as well. Another really cool open source project that I. Am planning on building one day is actually called a tilt bridge.

And a tilt bridge is based on the ESP 32 microcontroller, and the difference between an ESP 30 to microcontroller and an ESP 82 66 is that the ESP 32 can also has Bluetooth built into it. So for example, let’s use the tilt hydrometer. Which I do own, and the tilt hydrometer has, it doesn’t work on wifi.

That that’s kind of the way that they use it to conserve power and you don’t blow through batteries in it. It uses Bluetooth, Bluetooth, low energy, and that Bluetooth, Ellie doesn’t use a lot of power. It’s low energy, but it does. Allow you to get the data off of the board to anything that has Bluetooth.

So the tilt bridge, and this is a open source project written by John Beeler, who actually wrote the furniture, the Ferman track software. He’s built this bridge that you can actually take the ESP 32 microcontroller. And it bridges the Bluetooth to wifi so that you can then have the wifi. Take the data and move it to any website on the cloud that you want to be able to log your tilt data.

So right now, the only way to do so if you don’t have something like the tilt bridge is you’re bridging it with like an old cell phone or an iPad or something like that to get the data to convert. So the tilt bridge is a nice little open source project. Doesn’t look super complicated, but it’s, that is actually what it does.

Another open source project that is out there that has nothing to do with actually brewing beer in a hardware sense. Most of the things that we’ve just talked about have some sort of hardware component because you’re trying to basically make this software work in the physical world is, but this, this.

Project is an open source project that is software based only, and that’s brew target and brew. Target is an open source brewing software like beer Smith or brew father, which is one of our sponsors. But the idea of brew target is that it’s essentially a free and open source version of homebrewing software.

It’s going to do all the things you needed to do. It’s going to help you create recipes. It’s going to have different styles in it for you to compare to. It’s going to generate IB use, so you, you’re going to be able to build your recipes in this software and be able to do so well. The cool thing about brew target as well is that it’s going to work on any operating system, so it’s going to work on Mac.

It’ll work on windows, and it’ll work on Linux. Finding a neat native. Brewing software that’s not cloud-based, that works on Linux is going to be tough. I think brew target and beer Smith, I know beer Smith has a Linux version are going to work, but that’s pretty much it. So if you’re looking for open source brewing software, brew target is where you want to go.

Another project in the brewery controller realm is strange brew. Strange brew like the craft beer pie is going to be an open source Linux-based brewery controller. It’s a. It’s actually a Java and fermentation. It’s a Java brewery and fermentation controllers. What is it? Claims on its website in strange brew has some really cool stuff right out the box.

You can do things like live data graphing. You can have timers, you can load your mash steps via a beer XML file right into your brewery. It does some pretty cool stuff and. You could do so with a pretty minimal hardware set up and it’s all running off of a raspberry PI, just like the craft beer pie. So very similar type project.

But the strange brew has been around a lot longer. I think it actually started in 2012 or 2013 so it’s been around for quite awhile. So if you’re looking for a different project for brewery control, maybe strange brew might be the right fit for you as well. Well. I think that that’s a pretty good list of different open source projects that you could look into for your brewery that are out there today.

But if you have other ones that you might’ve seen that I didn’t mention here, please shoot me an email at . Podcast@homebrewingdiy.beer. I would love to hear from you and find out some more projects out there that I could do a deep dive on, or if there’s a project that you would love to hear more about, let me know.

Podcast at home brewing, DIY it up here. I think so. In conclusion, would I. The point I’m trying to make with this episode of our podcast is that there’s a ton of different open source projects out there that you could be looking at when you’re talking about building something from your brewery. To be honest, if you think about home brewing in general, it in itself is kind of an open source project.

The different systems that we build to get to the final product, which is beer, are really just different. Accumulations of the knowledge that we learn from other people and then create that to make beer. So kind of cool stuff. And I just am a big supporter of the open source world. Kind of a, a bit of a.

Piece of knowledge, the first six episodes of this podcast, we’re actually all done 100% on open source software and using Linux as the OOS. I ended up getting a Mac later just through getting a new computer and things are now done on that. But when I first started this podcast, this was a completely open source project, and we talked about a lot of different open source projects.

So kind of cool and just wanted to kind of let you guys know that as well. So yeah. But in conclusion, there are a ton of open source projects out there. I think that, you know, right now you could leave this show and do some pretty good Google flew out there and find something cool to work on. So other than that, uh, we’ll talk to you all next week.

I’d like to thank everybody . For sticking around with me and listening to this week’s show, I will put links to some of the projects that we talked about in today’s show. If you head over to homebrewing diy.beer, it’ll be in the show notes. You can also leave it as feedback by sending an email to podcast at home brewing DIY about beer.

I’d love to hear some of the projects that you’re working on and will, who knows? Maybe we’ll read it on the show. Well, that’s it for this week and we’ll talk to you next week on home brewing.





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