People who don't have the luxury of a cold room or a basement with stable temperatures may opt to run a swamp-cooler which involves soaking a t-shirt or rag in water and wrapping your fermenter in the wet garment and placing this whole contraption into a bucket of water and pointing a fan at it. This drives down the temperature of your fermenting beer through evaporation, you can even throw some ice-packs into the water to keep it chilled and can often get the beer down to an acceptable fermenting temp, although you have very little control over what that temperature will settle on and you can still experience large temperature swings.
STC-1000 Digital temperature controller |
To that end I built a chamber out of 2" rigid foam insulation which is attached to a very small mini-fridge which acts as the cooling source. The first iteration of this build used an STC-1000 temperature controller to switch the fridge on and off whenever the set point of the controller was exceeded by .5 degrees C, and while this enabled me to control the fermentation at a static temperature, it made it difficult to run any kind of stepped fermentation where the temperature could be raised or lowered based on a set schedule. The other problem with the STC-1000 is that it provided no way to log temperatures, or to be able to manage and modify the fermentation temperature without going into my basement and manually plugging in a new value.
I wanted more visibility and more control into my fermentation than I had with the STC-1000 and thus the CrankBrew idea was born. While there are a few systems out there already based on the Raspberry Pi I really wanted to do something from scratch so I could build a truly custom system. I choose a Beaglebone Black as the primary controller, it's similar to a Raspberry Pi but has more I/O pins, a faster processor, and built in storage and you get all that for about $10 more.
I wanted more visibility and more control into my fermentation than I had with the STC-1000 and thus the CrankBrew idea was born. While there are a few systems out there already based on the Raspberry Pi I really wanted to do something from scratch so I could build a truly custom system. I choose a Beaglebone Black as the primary controller, it's similar to a Raspberry Pi but has more I/O pins, a faster processor, and built in storage and you get all that for about $10 more.
Beaglebone Black with test wiring for DS18B20 temp probe |
Cool Blog Deric. Now I can read about the stuff I don't understand. HA!
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