brewce: Brewing Beer with Zephyr, Android and Thingsboard – Christian Hirsch
Beer is one of the oldest known cultural beverages. Its main ingredients are water, (barley) malt, hop and yeast. The process of brewing beer is well-known and in order to dissolve the starch from the malt into the water, also called mashing, the malt and water mixture is heated up to specific temperatures that need to be hold for a certain amount of time. This gives the enzymes in the malt the ability to break up the starch to dissolve it. Hobby brewers normally use home brew kits and commercially available equipment to brew their own beer. In this talk, Christian Hirsch presents brewce: a setup of home-brewed electronics for home brewing beer. brewce consists of four devices: a modified induction cooker, a temperature sensor, a pump control and a smartphone. The induction cooker was reverse engineered and equipped with some electronics which runs the Zephyr RTOS and which lets one control it via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The same is true for the temperature sensor and the pump control. An Android app on a smartphone connects to all three devices via BLE and controls the induction cooker and a pump based on the temperature sensor’s readings to run the mashing procedure. Christian presents the setup, the electronics and firmware, the obstacles and the results.
