My Temp Control Setup

[ArnieW]

Or, you could do away with having a PC sitting there taking up real estate and go picaxe.......

http://members.iinet.net.au/~u9013943/picaxe.htm

BN

Nice work BN, I too am a picaxe fan.

 

[BrotherNutz]

Nice work BN, I too am a picaxe fan.

Handy little gadget aren't they. I got a new LCD screen for a new project I am working on, it has a 4 line by 30 character blue backlit! Very snazzy.

Real power is using the PIC in it's native form, but that is a whole other programming language. My egg-head buddy can program them, but I will stick with picbasic for now I think.

Pete

 

[Zizzle]

A laptop in a brewery environment is asking for it I think. PICAXE cost ~$100.

Like the LCD screen on the PICAXE does. Or a thermometer for that matter.

Ha ha, I don't have a brewery I just home brew at my house. Not a terrible environment for a laptop. Besides my setup uses CAT5 for the cabling and the PC was acually in a different part of the house.

You can pick up a PentiumII laptop on ebay for about $50. Has much better resolution to display graphs than a little mono LCD. I means graphs like the one in the first post of this thread. Easier to program, and can serve in other roles (recipe software).

Having said all that, I went with an AVR Atmega128 and a 240x64 LCD instead of a laptop to run the brewbot. Far more complicated than this fridge temp stuff.

I have played with the smaller PIC chips. Have written code for them in C and in PIC ASM. Not really a great CPU architecture, but gets the job done I guess. The thing that made me give up on them was they seemed to handle a very limited number of flash cycles. Maybe I had a bad batch, dunno. The AVRs have been much nicer to work with and more reliable.

I would hate to think about having to write the code for a project like the bewbot in BASIC. Eeww.
I think C is a nice middle ground. Easier to learn & use than ASM, but still generates fast, compact and easily maintained code.

Hey Arnie, didn't you use a PC or laptop to run HERMAN at one point? (just catching up on your blog now)

 

[pbrosnan]

Does it control the temps

From my earlier post ...

"It's not a controller but ..."

cheers

Patrick.

 

[pbrosnan]

Hi all,

Here's the link to the kit supplier. The kits I used are K145 (temp logger), K173 (tx), K 174 (rx).

Have fun.

 

[ArnieW]

Hey Arnie, didn't you use a PC or laptop to run HERMAN at one point? (just catching up on your blog now)

Hi Zizzle,

yep, that's right. I got a bit sick of windoze crashing and losing all control and at that point I was using pic micros for interfacing anyway. So I'm now using the best of both worlds ...

The pic handles all control and there is a push button panel that handles target temps and turns on pump, mixer etc. This has a serial connection to the PC which can graph the data and also remotely control the whole thing. The PC can do far more complex calculations and effectively automate the process - the pic means I don't lose control if the PC fails.

And mostly these days I run it without the PC - it is just simpler.

cheers, Arnie

PS. Haven't updated that blog for months now - I've been distracted by other beverage projects (or maybe an excuse to bypass the hop shortage ;-)

 

[Franko]

Hi all,

Here's the link to the kit supplier. The kits I used are K145 (temp logger), K173 (tx), K 174 (rx).

Have fun.

Does anyone else here use the K145 Temp logger here.
I got a couple of samples of the DS18S20 from maxim and been thinking of building one of these kits for a few weeks now

Franko

 

[Zwickel]

Franco, especially for the DS1820 Ive found a nice little Proggi to record temps over the time for hours, days, weeks month. Its drawing a graph and you can record more than 8 different temps at the same time. All temp probes are wired to the one wire bus.
Its open source software, very nice.

If someone is interested in, Ill post the links to it.

Cheers

 

[Franko]

Franco, especially for the DS1820 Ive found a nice little Proggi to record temps over the time for hours, days, weeks month. Its drawing a graph and you can record more than 8 different temps at the same time. All temp probes are wired to the one wire bus.
Its open source software, very nice.

If someone is interested in, Ill post the links to it.

Cheers

Please Zwickel that would be great

 

[Zwickel]

Please Zwickel that would be great

okey-dokey, youll need a driver for the one wire:
http://www.maxim-ic.com/products/ibutton/s.../tmex/index.cfm

and the proggi itself, LogTemp: http://www.mrsoft.fi/ohj01en.htm

I have connected the temp probs to the serial port, but its also possible to use an USB port.

:icon_cheers:

 

[bugwan]

okey-dokey, youll need a driver for the one wire:
http://www.maxim-ic.com/products/ibutton/s.../tmex/index.cfm

and the proggi itself, LogTemp: http://www.mrsoft.fi/ohj01en.htm

I have connected the temp probs to the serial port, but its also possible to use an USB port.

:icon_cheers:

Excellent work Zwickel, I've been looking for a native Windows-based logger for ages. I just don't seem to have gotten the search terms right. Currently I'm using a pretty fragile connection between Digitemp (for temp collection), RRDTool (for data storage/graphing) and getting all that to run via a Perl script through IIS...! I challenge anyone else to do it in under 6 months
Currently it's not actually monitoring brew temps, but that will come...

Thanks again Zwick, I'll be testing this software out tonight...looks the goods!

Dave

 

[pbrosnan]

Excellent work Zwickel, I've been looking for a native Windows-based logger for ages. I just don't seem to have gotten the search terms right. Currently I'm using a pretty fragile connection between Digitemp (for temp collection), RRDTool (for data storage/graphing) and getting all that to run via a Perl script through IIS...! I challenge anyone else to do it in under 6 months
Currently it's not actually monitoring brew temps, but that will come...

Thanks again Zwick, I'll be testing this software out tonight...looks the goods!

Dave

I used Jfreechart for the graphing part of the app I built to read the temps from the serial port. Very complete piece of software for no cost and it's OS of course.

http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/

 

[Gulf Brewery]

bugwan

I have all that stuff you mention running without a problem. I used the software from here - http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/
I did have some hassles until I got the correct version of the perl module to do the graphing.

Cheers
Pedro

 

[loftboy]

This looks interesting software for monitoring & graphing. Looks like it uses the nomal K145 temp kit that Kits R Us & Ozitronics sell.

http://www.oceancontrols.com.au/data_acqui...K145_Server.htm

 

[Franko]

I found this software last night while surfing around for the K145


Looks nice and will do all I need to keep an eye on temps for the time being.

Here's a Link to the site

and a few screen shots

 

[bugwan]

bugwan

I have all that stuff you mention running without a problem. I used the software from here - http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/
I did have some hassles until I got the correct version of the perl module to do the graphing.

Cheers
Pedro

Yep, MartyBugs is my lifesaver. I really set up the DS18S20 as a monitor for my PC cabinet - it runs a bit hot under the TV (up to 40 deg on a hot day!). Here's the current chart. Looks the goods!

It seems there's quite a few bits of software out there, including some that Maxim supplies themselves from here...!. It's called OneWireViewer.

Thanks for all the other links, but now that I've nutted out the RRDTool and Digitemp, it gives me some pretty funky charts. It's just a matter of sorting out a serial to usb converter for the laptop now, which watches over my brewing...

Dave.

 

[ArnieW]

It's just a matter of sorting out a serial to usb converter for the laptop now, which watches over my brewing...

Dave.

Hi Dave,

this is the one that I'm using - and very happy with it. You just plug it into the usb and a new serial port gets listed.

And fabulous info in these recent threads everyone - thanks, Arnie

 

[bugwan]

Hi Dave,

this is the one that I'm using - and very happy with it. You just plug it into the usb and a new serial port gets listed.

And fabulous info in these recent threads everyone - thanks, Arnie

There's no end of assistance around here...! Thanks Arnie, top work. I also found a temp monitor for Dallas 1-wire probes on the site that Zwickel linked to earlier. It runs as a native windows service, which sounds better than calling a script from a batch file every 5 minutes (which I currently to do create my RRD graphs... Further investigation required

It's all good stuff.