Kegerface – for all your beer stocking needs

Kegerface is a digital tap list display from SchrodingersDrunk, which you can read more about over on Reddit. It’s an interface for a Kegerator, hence the name. I had to look that up – a Kegerator is a device for dispensing draught beer in the home, involving all kinds of kit like a fridge and a tank full of carbon dioxide. In the picture below, it’s the thing with the spigots sticking out of it.

We, of course, are interested in what’s going on above the spigots.

Click to embiggen

The back-end here is some PHP which interprets data from a shared Google spreadsheet. The whole thing runs off a Raspberry Pi that’s attached to the back of the display. All the information you need is here: the type of beer, the ABV, the hoppiness (scored out of three – that’s what the green glyphs represent), the maker, and, most importantly, how much you have left.

You can find SchrodingersDrunk’s code, along with assets like those hop graphics on Github. The Kegerface is under a CC licence, and other Kegerator owners have been modifying the setup for their own use.

Andy Davies has done a lot of work on his own version. He’s tweaked the interface, and added the bar temperature and a breakdown of how many pints are left in stock; he’s also using MySQL rather than going the CSV/PHP route.

Compare with the interface above, and spot the differences! (Click to enlarge.) We deplore your taste in ginger beer, Andy. Hollows & Fentimans’ hard stuff is much nicer.

Andy’s also made the Kegerface work for bottled beer as well as draught beers, and best of all, has made stock updating easier by attaching an RFID reader to an Arduino, which is then hooked up to the Pi. So every time you take a bottle, you swipe the attached RFID tag across the bar, and the stock is adjusted on the Kegerface. Again, everything’s on GitHub if you want to try building one yourself.

I’m trying to work out whether it’s legal for us to get one of these for the office.


BrewPi

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.)

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.


Thursday grab bag

I’m in a bit of a rush today; we’re driving down to Wales with Pete in an hour or so to visit the UK factory, which is celebrating a special anniversary tomorrow. So here’s a grab bag of stuff from around the internet that people have been doing with their Pis. You guys have been having a busy week.

Beer Church, a group attached to the hackspace at Pumping Station:One in Chicago, have been brewing the good stuff using Raspberry Pis to control cooling.

This isn’t the only brewing project we’re aware of, but it’s the first we’ve seen pictures from. If you’re using your Raspberry Pi to control fermentation (bread, beer or kimchee), please drop us a line; we’d love to hear from you.

Rob’s hackspace tour of the US continues, and the photos that are emerging make the rest of us wish we were there with him – it looks brilliant. Our friends from Adafruit dropped by last night’s event at NYCResistor. A couple of photos below: you can see more on Adafruit. Rob has added an extra stop today: if you’re in the CS Lounge at Colombia University at 5.30pm, he’ll be there to talk about Pi.

Lady Ada demonstrates Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi PoV wand

Rob, capturing hearts and minds.

Back in the UK, Chris Roffey got in touch to tell us about a series of Coding Club books he’s writing for kids. You can read more about the series by clicking on the image, and there’s a PDF you can preview of the introduction to the Python Basics book, due next month.

One of my favourite projects this week has been this face recognition security camera from Kean Walmsley. He says: “Here’s the elevator pitch: Facecam is a security camera that recognises a resident’s Facebook friends when they come to their front door and allows for tailored communication both to the resident and the visitor.” Read more about it here and here.

Not all projects have to have productive value, though: here’s a Raspberry Pi missile launcher for your office from itr8r.

Raspberry Pi Retaliation. Click to visit site and download source code.

Heather heard someone call their Raspberry Pi a “Raspberry Pee Eye”, and was inspired to make this crocheted raspberry complete with Tom Selleck moustache.

Click to visit Heather’s blog.

And here’s a bit of video: aaa801 has got open webOS, HP’s mobile/tablet operating system, running on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

“This video shows the first public build of open webOS running on the Raspberry Pi. There is no GUI at this point in time for ARM builds, there should be one within a month or so. When the GUI is up and running I will release a ROM to the community.” Thanks aaa801 – we’re looking forward to it!

Right. I’m off to Wales. Wish me luck with the caravans.