Feel free to contact me and provide any other feedback directly as well using the Contact Form.  In the sections below I list controller development ideas that are currently on my radar.  As this is a hobby, it’s just me working on it currently, and at time of writing only costs me money, please be patient as things won’t move very fast.  Please do let me know if this project interests you.  The more interest I get the more I’ll focus on development.

Not saying it’s perfect by any means…but I’m pretty happy with the hardware side of things with my Brewno Controller V2.  Feel free to provide suggestions though.

One idea that came up while doing my install was to make it easier to remote mount the encoders.  As a one off, you can make it work easy enough just like I did by soldering your connectors.  A more elegant solution would be to create small PCBs to plug in the encoders; these small PCBs would need a connector mounted on them.  Similarly the main Brewno board would need a connector for each encoder and then the user could easily run cables between the main board and the remote encoders.  To save some room on the main board it would probably be best to just delete the mounts all together and assume everyone will remote mount.

PC Program

If anybody would like to offer their superior C# skills to improving this program, I would be grateful.  I’m pretty happy with what I achieved but I’m close to my C# limits.  I have a few items I plan to add that will take some time but I believe are within my capabilities:

  • Add user set alarms
  • Add “Events” to allow the user to pre program in a Brew Plan (eg. Mash Temperatures);
    • The program would notify the user when an events time is up
    • The user will “click” when they actually finish a specific event
    • This will be recorded in the data log file for reference later
    • Custom alarms may be set up for each event
  • Port program to Linux…and maybe Mac(this one is a longer term goal)

ADS1220 Arduino Library

I have uploaded this to Github and it is being developed there.  You are welcome to make contributions to it’s development there.  I will maintain a frozen copy here to use with Brewno to ensure it functions as planned for the brewing application.

Brewno Arduino Program

I’m pretty happy with how this is operating.  If I make other changes, I will likely have to make changes to the Brewno logic as well.  I do have the Brewno program uploaded to Github as well for development if you would like to contribute.

The only glitch I’ve personally encountered is that the odd time when powered up, the unit freezes (sometimes with a garbled LCD).  This only happens on startup and only rarely.  I haven’t been able to figure this one out; if anyone has any suggestions do let me know.  It’s not a big deal though; worst case if it happens, you just power down and restart.  It never happens once things are properly booted up so it won’t cause any issues mid-brew.