entens.net The less one forgets, the less one can remember.

27Sep/090

Initial Brew Rig Planning

uberbrewrig_controls uberbrewrig

Arighty, I said I would post this, but life got in the way. Heres the run down of my current plans.

Containers:
I'm going to have three 10 gallon stainless steel containers fabricated. These will serve as the sparg tank, the mash tun, and the boil kettle. I could really get away with two, but then I couldn't run two batches at once.

Fermenters will be 10 gallon glass carboys, or stainless tanks. I'm hoping I will be able to get some air tight stainless tanks, but as far as cost and speed I can buy the glass carboys locally minus the cost of materials, fabrication, and design time.

Chiller will be a stainless tank holding approximately 12 gallons capacity to compensate for copper cooling plumbing and a pelter cooler.

All inter-container plumbing will use copper pipe.

Heating:

I will heating the sparg tank, mash tun, and boil kettle using propane heat. I'm planning on using a 21 or 32 tip propane heating element beneath each unit. Propane makes things simple as I won't need to run a natural gas line because I can reuse propane canisters from the grill.

Controls:
Right now I'm planning on using an Allen-Bradley SLC-500 PLC for all the grunt work. The SLC-500 is an industrial grade programmable logic controller. Allen-Bradley says they had 1.6 million of these little dandies installed worldwide, but they are now considered obsolete. Obsolete is relative. You can pick these units up for a song on ebay and they have more than enough capability to control my approximately 40 I/O points.

For controlling my SLC-500 I'm going to write some nifty code for an Arduino. The Arduino is going to provide a 'supervisor' mode to the SLC-500.  Basically I want to abstract an web-based interface on top of the SLC-500 that can be used to program recipes and monitor the rig.

10Sep/090

TomTom Launches Open Source Navigation Project

from article:

"This technological development is being introduced to the open source community to assist in delivering location based services to customers. TomTom will use this technology for its own services too, allowing us to transmit content like HD Traffic to connected devices and improve service quality and coverage," Mark Gretton, TomTom's Director of Product Engineering, said In a prepared statement.

A knew that buying that GPS module for my laptop would pay off sooner or later...

9Sep/090

Ubigraph

Ubigraph is a library for generating interactive, multidimensional graphs.

9Sep/090

Facial Recognition

Primer from Carnegie-Mellon

Opensource Computer Vision and tutorial.

Also, see Java implementations of OCR and apply to larger sample size.