Brew Controller Update 6 - Changes

I started from scratch again!

So a lot has changed since the last update on my controller build, in which I had sort discussion about potentially using Windows IOT core and ultimately deciding to stay on Avolonia.net. Well, I was continuously getting frustrated with it as I was struggling with things just not working like it should even when following the documentation. Having finally gotten to my breaking point with it, I went away looking for an alternative, either in framework tooling or in my approach.

While diving through various articles and blog posts, I can across this video from Tim Corey: Intro to Uno, if you don’t know about Tim Corey, he is a fantastic .Net person and you can learn alot from him. While the video was old, I was interested in learning more about Uno. Turns out it is a cross platform framework that works really well, for the most part and do actually have documentation on publishing your app for the Raspberry Pi.

So for the last year I have been reading documentation, looking at the many sample apps that they have, and also building some small apps to wrap my head around how it works. This is not alll I have been doing though, I have also taken another look at what I am trying to build and have reframed my goal slightly. I was trying to build something that was configurable for anyone for any type of system and realised that I will take forever to build something that I can use so, I have made some changes in my goal:

• Build a controller for a 3 vessel, 2 pump HERMS system.
• Use the 1-wire system for temperature monitoring
• GPIO On/Off for control of pumps
• GPIO with PID to control heating elements.
• Pull recipe and steps from central admin system
• Create a batch when brewing and log all stats to central admin system.

I have also updated both the central admin system and controller to log SEQ using Serliog so I have a uniform set of information and error logging. I have refactored the API and admin web app as well, as I felt I had over engineered those two and made them a little simpler in my setup.

So, where am I know? The controller so far:

• Load settings
• Register, deregister and update admin with details
• pull recipes from admin
• configure the 1-wire devices for each kettle
• configure Pump GPIOs

So now there is no real plan on what next, I am going to build the remaining parts by following the workflow I expect to follow during a brew day, from recipe creation through to botling/kegging. Below are some screenshots of the controller and admin UI for now.

Admin UI

Controller loading screen

Controller Dashboard

Controller Settings

Controller 1-Wire

Controller pumps

Controller Recipes

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While working on the workflow I also be doing odd jobs like getting the colour scheme sorted, most of the components utilise the default theme that is created by Uno using Material UI, so I need to override that with the right colours that you see in the loading screen with the controller logo.