Lets build a controller

Introducing my new Brewery Controller

I love home brewing, I started out with beer but have made others like mead and more recently, wine and I am also a technical person. I work in IT and love developing my own applications to help with things at home.

My current setup is 3 vessel HERMS system, being run by CraftBeerPi. I have built up a small hit list of things I wish worked slightly differently with CBPI V4, but I don’t have the time to learn a new development language, python, to be able to contribute to the state of CBPI. I do love CBPI, and the people working on it do a great job in their spare time to fix and improve it, not to mention the really friendly and active community around it helping each other.

Being a technical person, I love tinkering with things and there are some things I want to build into a controller, plus there is also the challenge of builing my own version of a controller.

So what am I building?  

I use brewfather currently for Recipe design and basic batch managment, and I really love this application so I don’t want to replace it. Below are the highlights of what I want to have in the end result:

• Integrate to BrewFather to pull recipe steps and add Batch information
• TILT integration (replace my TILT Pi setup)
• Administration Portal to view and Manage:
  • Recipe Steps
  • Batch data including Fermentation
  • Controllers
  • Send Recipe to a controller
• Controller:
  • Run 3 vessel HERMS (2 elements and 3 temperature sensors)
  • Run 2 pumps
  • TILT hub
  • Basic Fermentation temperature control
  • Connectivity to Admin Portal

I will be building this using .Net 8, the admin Portal will be built using Blazor with Fluent UI. I am not yet sure how I plan to tackle the UI on the controller but will update on this site when I do.