In keeping with our educational mission, here’s a post about beer.
There seems to be a surprising overlap (perhaps it’s not so surprising) between the maker/hacker community and the home brew community. We are aware of a few small commercial breweries who are already using Raspberry Pis to drive automation of things like pressure and mash temperature, but until now everybody brewing with a Pi has had to come up with their own solutions.
Until now, that is. Elco, a beer and Pi enthusiast, has produced an open-source fermentation controller for the Raspberry Pi and an Arduino which is available for the whole community to use. (Those of you over legal drinking age, that is.) BrewPi allows you to control the process through a web browser interface. It’s completely user-configurable, will control temperature to within 0.1 degrees Celsius – and it outputs helpful graphs. (We like graphs.)
BrewPi user interface – lots of lovely, lovely graphs. Click to embiggen.
Elco’s currently working a digital specific gravity sensor (which at its current stage of development has to do with a weight dangling from a string), and he’s looking for community help with the continued development of BrewPi. Head over to his website, help out with the codebase and contribute to his wiki – and let us know if you end up using the software to do any brewing yourselves.
