Matho's controller

[claudiobr74]

Sure mate,

brauduino snubber.zip

cheers steve

Thank you! Best regards.

 

[Edak]

to try and reduce the interference caused by switching a AC pump, it seems that the EMI produced by switching was scrambling the LCD screen.

the extra parts are a 100nF metallised Polypropylene Capacitor and a 100 ohm 1/2 w resistor

cheers steve

Have these changes eliminated the issue? I don't remember you mentioning this issue in the past. This has happened to me once or twice also, drove me nuts.

 

[matho]

Have these changes eliminated the issue? I don't remember you mentioning this issue in the past. This has happened to me once or twice also, drove me nuts.

wotfm first mentioned it here http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/59563-i-want-mathos-controler/?p=975491 and the discussion follows the next couple of pages
putting a RC suppression circuit across the load or the contacts seems to work but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[real_beer]

Have these changes eliminated the issue? I don't remember you mentioning this issue in the past. This has happened to me once or twice also, drove me nuts.

Edak,

My controller went ballistic every time I turned it on, if I hadn't spent so much time & effort building it i'd have smashed it to pieces with a hammer :angry: .

I think most of the people who bought the first kits were going to use them with a little 12v brown pump (I was myself), so the problem didn't show itself until a few people tried them with 240v pumps.

When I saw people start disscussing using a march pump instead, I decided to do the same & added the extra wiring & power outlet. Unfortunately for me although people disscussed the idea well before I built mine they musn't have built theirs straight away. When I first up powered the controller up I thought I'd messed the soldering up or damaged a part during assembly. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to fix the problem Steve kindly offered to check the boards out but didn't find a problem. When I got them back (along with a new set Steve had made) I had the same problem again and couldn't figure out what was wrong, so I gave up & decided if they worked okay for Steve he might as well have them & sent them back.

Then the EMI problem surfaced as all the lazy bastards who'd originally bought their kits finally started to build them :lol: . I must also point out I used pretty heavy guage wire on the outlets which probably exacerbated the problem a fair bit more than other members builds.

Steve sent the boards back last week & I got the extra parts from Jaycar the next day & soldered them in, success!
After numerous on/off cylces the contoller hasn't shown a problem, all the buttons, lights & menu's work as they should so I think you could confidently say the problem is solved. Fingers crossed.

I can't tell you how satisfying it is after all the problems to finally see the thing working as it was designed to be :super: .

Thanks again Steve

 

[wotafm]

wotfm first mentioned it here http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/59563-i-want-mathos-controler/?p=975491 and the discussion follows the next couple of pages
putting a RC suppression circuit across the load or the contacts seems to work but I'm not 100% sure.

i have run my unit quite a few times now and the snubber circuit has stopped the problem.
before i put it on it would scramble the display 8 out of 10 times

 

[Sam England]

Evening Lads,
Finally some pics of the build. Hopefully it will give a few others some ideas, as I know I've stolen a heap from the other builds (Matho obviously & ArnieW may spring to mind). Still hoping to edit the code and add the second unit as a HLT next to the first. The malt pipe will lift out from the first and transfer to the second for a recirculated sparge or for parti-gyle if I'm doing a high OG brew.

Functional unit - wired for the second HLT which is only partly finished. The missus is stoked as I'm now brewing outside and not taking over "her" kitchen!!

Elements wired in parallel pairs. 4 x 3000W giving total of 3000W with four times the surface area. Malt pipe inlet in the centre.

Base of malt pipe with legs to sit it in the base of the kettle. Malt pipe uses tightish diameters and no seals to couple to the spigot in the kettle base.

Malt pipe extension for larger brews and top filter plate assembly with clamps.

Used to circulate the wort during chilling and to tie hop bags to during the boil. My immersion chiller will fit straight in over the top and not cause issues with hop spiders etc. The vertical leg is blocked just above the horizontal arm to divert the flow.

Stout wort recirculating. Mashed in with 23L and 4.85kg grain. Just over 80% eff into fermenter, so stoked with the first brew. 1.5L lost to trub which was also a hell of a lot less than my previous BIAB which I put down to clearer wort.

Boil with hop bags tied to spigot in the middle. I had to bump the boil set temp up to 99.5 degrees to get a suitable boil.

All in all, a hell of a lot smoother brew day than I expected for the first run. Now to start with the continuous tweaking process!!
Cheers again to everyone who helped get me to this point,
BB

 

[Sam England]

Left out the filter plate arrangement. Please excuse my sewing, but just coarse voille bag with a drawstring that's pulled up over the butchered keg lid I chopped out for the pot. I'll be converting the second one to the bottom plate now that I know the top works and is strong enough. I'll probably use more smaller windows and block the centre hole so that the grain weight doesn't push through and restrict the flow.

 

[Edak]

You couldn't bless us with higher res/size pictures? The ones in your post are about 20 pixels large.

 

[Sam England]

Arvo Edak,

Sorry for the images, but it's the first time I'd posted from the gallery and must have stuffed up the settings when I linked them. The Gallery is labelled Blue Baggers, but you should get there from the link below.
http://aussiehomebrewer.com/gallery/member/21459-blue-baggers/

Cheers,
BB

 

[PeteQ]

Blue baggers it all looks awesome, well done!

I know this project is all about how cheap you can get it done, but for around $20 you can get some stainless mesh instead of the voile bag? Maybe something to think of if you have a blowout? Even the little brown pump easily bent 1.5mm stainless plate that was only 220mm diameter fixed in the centre.

80% efficiency into the fermenter is very good! I'm generally getting around 70% but I've been doing a lot of tweaking lately and have it up to around 75% and hoping to get up well into the 80's.

Cheers
Pete

 

[Sam England]

Cheers Pete,
I was stoked with the efficiency as well. That was with 10L of sparge water to get my preboil volume of 31L, so not the purist version of the braumeister single vessel.

Although I mentioned the voille as a tight arse option, I actually decided to use it to maximise the flow area. At max pressure the pump can put around 18kg force on the top plate (assuming a blockage) which is considerably less than the load some of the double batch BIABers put on their bags so thought I'd give it a crack. Me hedging my bets is also the reason why I hadn't made my bottom plate out of the other keg cutout so that I had a fall back of the voille didn't work. It is actually a fair bit coarser in weave than my old BIAB bags which helped with the flow.

 

[Edak]

Very impressive! Well done BB

 

[lael]

Looks great! How does the extendable malt pipe work? What capacity does the build do?

 

[Sam England]

Cheers guys,
Lael, the 4 bolts on the side of the standard pot just undo and the extra BigW pot with the bottom cut out of it just sleeves down inside of it. These bolts I removed just get put back in and some extra bolts go in the top sleeve to support the filter plate as per the shorter design. I haven't tested it for wort flow yet as I've only done the one brew, but I'd expect to get at least another 2.5-3kg of grain in there. This would give a grain bill of around 8kg with the lowest volume of around 25L at Mash in. Not sure how big a beer I could end up with yet as I haven't run the calcs, but this is where I was looking at using a parti-gyle setup with the other pot. Probably useful for a high alc belgium dubbel. With this pipe I could probably knock out 35L of 1.045 beer, but as I prefer the variety and convenience of kegging I can't see me doing much more than 25L very often.

 

[jonw]

Hey guys,

I have a problem that sounds a little like the screen-scrambling issue mentioned here. I'm not using Matho's controller - rather I'm building something similar for a 3V system. I have a concealed element in my tun for use as a direct fired RIMS. During the mash, I hear the occasional "ticking" sound coming from the tun, which I think is the over-temp cutout on the element kicking in (happened lots today when I tried to do a protein rest, but that's a different story.) Sometimes the screen on my controller goes blank and won't come back to life without power cycling (backlight stays on, just no characters) and this seems to coincide with the the ticking sound.

The element's controlled through a SSR. Does it sound plausible that the over-temp cutout's causing this? If so, would a snubber as described previously help?

Cheers,

Jon

 

[Edak]

A solid state relay will prevent the EMI issue, so there is another cause for the problem, SSR's get really hot when they are conducting (power to your element on), perhaps you have a heat issue?

 

[MastersBrewery]

A solid state relay will prevent the EMI issue, so there is another cause for the problem, SSR's get really hot when they are conducting (power to your element on), perhaps you have a heat issue?

As I understand it the problem solve with the snubber unit was one of noise on the 240v circuit connected directly to the shield it self. Now if there is an SSR involved then there should only be clean 12v connected to the arduino/shield. The EMI may well be causes by the proximity of the 240v to the arduino/shield. Easy to test for by moving the SSR a good distance away and lengthening the 12v run to it, of course ensuring the rest of the 240v is well clear at the same time. Users of system such as Brewtroller regularly have seperate high and low voltage control boxes that elliminate the problem.

 

[jonw]

I've got three SSRs in the box, all screwed to the same heatsink. I've used heat transfer compound, and the heatsink doesn't get hot to touch (warm yes, hot no).

The pictures below show the inside (excuse messy wiring for the time being!) and the heatsink from the back.

The screen blanking does co-incide with the tciking noise. Thanks for ruling out EMI. I guess I'll have to swap things around to narrow it down, e.g. swap around the HLT and MLT SSRs to see if that makes any difference.





Cheers,

Jon

 

[jonw]

As I understand it the problem solve with the snubber unit was one of noise on the 240v circuit connected directly to the shield it self. Now if there is an SSR involved then there should only be clean 12v connected to the arduino/shield. The EMI may well be causes by the proximity of the 240v to the arduino/shield. Easy to test for by moving the SSR a good distance away and lengthening the 12v run to it, of course ensuring the rest of the 240v is well clear at the same time. Users of system such as Brewtroller regularly have seperate high and low voltage control boxes that elliminate the problem.

Hmmm, OK. I have my arduino very close to my SSRs. Unfortunately there's not much I can do about that without a fairly significant redesign. The SSRs are transistor driven per Matho's circuit, so they're reasonably isolated. There's certainly only 12V going to my "shield".

I think I'll tidy up my cabling int he first place and see if that does any good.

 

[MastersBrewery]

I've got three SSRs in the box, all screwed to the same heatsink. I've used heat transfer compound, and the heatsink doesn't get hot to touch (warm yes, hot no).

The pictures below show the inside (excuse messy wiring for the time being!) and the heatsink from the back.

The screen blanking does co-incide with the tciking noise. Thanks for ruling out EMI. I guess I'll have to swap things around to narrow it down, e.g. swap around the HLT and MLT SSRs to see if that makes any difference.

IMG_0355.jpg

IMG_0356.JPG

Cheers,

Jon

From what you've said in your previous two posts, I recon your elements boil dry switch is kicking in and the result is EMI created when current is going from full draw to zero and then back to full draw. Looking at the control box you have a lot of HV (240v) in close proximity to the Arduino. You could try shielding the Arduino, but more common to sheild the cables causing the interferance.