Aug 30
It is with great pleasure that I announce two new websites for your blog, beer and building pleasure.
These two sites will be tracking the progress of the Fermentinator project.
Nov 21
I have recently been involved more on a Solar Power thread on the popular Whirlpool forum, and thought that a recent post that I made would be appropriate to discus here on Bloggle.
Despite the nuclear bluster that I regularly espouse, I am a fan of PV solar power.
What I an NOT a fan of is govt rebates and handouts in order to make PV Solar seem viable.
And currently, PV Solar hoe based installs ARE NOT viable. In order to find out why, click the read link and I will go right in to it.
Sep 23
Due to popular demand, this is a follow up post outlining the electrical layout of the temperature control circuit for the fermentinator.
Sep 23
This is an interesting question that I have found myself asking lately.
I rant the first test through my cabinet with the following conditions.
I used a Coopers ‘kit and kilo’ kit of their Sparkling Ale.
It was mixed as per instructions to make up 23l.
BEFORE pitching the yeast I took 11.5l out into a second carboy.
Yeast was divided and pitched.
Sep 07
Yes, yes you can.
In my previous post I outlined what I was hoping to acheive with this project. I have now completed the mark II revision and will soon have some results to taste.
The process was reasonably simple with a little electronic magic.
The first part of the project was to build a cabinet to hold the fermentation carboy. This is a 30 litre container that is used to hold the beer mixture while the yeast chows down on the fermentable sugars to produce alcohol. The cabinet is basically just a 6mm MDF box with another 6mm MDF box a little smaller on the inside. This creates a 1 inch void on each side that I filled with marine expanding foam.
Voila! A big ice-box basically.
That was the easy part.
OK onto the electronics and hardware.
In order to control the temperature, you are going to need two components.
1. a method to control the temperature
2. a method to affect change on the temperature
Jun 25
So, long time no blog.
One reason for that is that I have been busying myself with home brewing of beers, ciders and ginger beers. Home brewing is a great hobby that gives you great control over what you make. Flavours can be tweaked, styles can be modified.
On the whole it is a very simple process and certaqinly not one to be afraid of.
In days gone by, home brew was something that your neighbour or father in law did, and the results were never anything to write home about. They would spend nights in their shed or laundry concocting and maintaining their brew and spend the days roaming the neighbourhood and harassing their friends to collect bottles.
Times have certainly changed now. Coopers have seriously commercialised the worldwide home brewing industry and are the biggest home brew manufacturer in the world now. They product some fantastic kits and sell everything that you need.
A starter kit will set you back $80 and contain everything that you need to produce an excellent Coopers Lager.
I digress.
In my short time brewing I have discovered something that not all home brewers stumble upon. One of the most important factors of producing a GOOD home brew is ensuring that the first fermentaion cycle is done at a controlled temerature in the right range.
I have had some cracking results with beers brewed in my garage, but that was while the ambient temperatures were higher, and a bit more consistant. Now that we are in winter, the Sydney temps are varying a bit and where I live it gets as low as 3 or 4 decrees C overnight and as high as 20-24 during the day.
This is causing me issues.
My latest batch is no exception. The thermometer tells me that the maximum temp for the current brew was 21 deg C and the low was 16 deg c. This is going to be reflected in the taste I am sure. (ideal is 22 deg c)
So, what is a brewer to do to fix this? I am building a fermentation cabinet. Big enough to hold two carboys and lined with insulating foam, it will be able to level out the temp differences. However of course I am not leaving it at that. I have a peltier cooler and a temperature controller and am going to create a franken-heater-cooler cabinet that will hold a temperature. It will heat to get the right temp if the ambient temp is lower that the set temp and it will cool when the ambient is higher.
I am still collecting the parts at the moment, so expect updates in July as to how it is going, however my testing last weekend allowed me to refrigerate a cardboard box that was not insulated down to 6 degrees c from the ambient of 19 degrees c, and heat up to about 35 degrees c.
This is going to be an interesting project and I am yet to find any reference online about something similar.
Feb 23
The concept of the ‘Smart House’ is nothing new, and the reality for some years now has been that if you throw enough at an electrician, he will install some flavour of a domesticated commercial system.
For somewhere north of $5,000 you have been able to get a new house wired and installed with a Clipsal C-Bus system, but dont expect it to do very much except have very funky looking switched with LED’s on them and diide the house into a few zones that you can control the lights from other areas.
But is this enough for today?
Dec 08
As far as Home Theatre PC (HTPC) software goes, there are not a huge number of players in the software only market. Of course every Digital Tuner card comes with some flavour of Windows software, but that isnt all that usefull if you want to run a true HTPC network at home.
There are some fantastic *nix variants available, most around the same core.
Knoppmyth
Mythbuntu
MythDora
These are all of course built around the ever popular MythTV, however are all in LiveCD versions so that there is little to actually setup or compile. ( This is a very good thing as MythTV can be difficult at best to setup)
But now there is another player on the scene, has the playing field changed?
Nov 17
Are you the kind of ‘early adopter’ that loves to have non-consumer grade kit in your house?
Do you have PC based devices in your house to perform chores that embedded devices usually do?
If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the questions above then you understand the pain that is in my household currently.
In a revious post I postulated the woes of losing a raid 5 array and the heartache that goes along with the sick to the stomach feeling that you have lost years worth of accumaleted entertainment data.
It has been two weeks now, and I am pretty much no closer to having my 4 hoe systems back together again.
Nov 06
It is an old addage, but it is too too true.
Nothing earth shattering has happened, so breath a sigh of releif there, but I lost the home server on the weekend. Well it was a pretty devastating even to the kids.
The OS disk of my centos 5 based server went tits up for some reason known only to itself, and refused to reboot.
So that took the details of the software raid array with it, and now I am 1TB of data lighter.
That isnt quite true. There is still a chance, albeit a small one, that I can get the data back, I just havent been brave enough to try and rebuild it yet.
Basically that is 800gb of TV and movies that has been lost to the ether. (all recorded off TV of course. OF COURSE) 
I guess a backup would have been a wise thing to do, but when you splash out for 4 x 320gb discs to build a 1TB array, backing it up is actually a bit daunting.
Should I have built 2 arrays?
That wouldnt have helped because it was the controller (software) that failed so I would have had 2 dead arrays.
I knew the risks and I took a calculated risk considerring that it *was* a raid 5 array.
Lose a disk and pop in a new one for self healing….. right?
<sigh>
1TB external USB 2 single disks are now <$200 AUD so I guess that having one of them as a backup would be wise idea, but that is where you start to think crazy thoughts.
Hang on, I can get 1TB disks now for the same as what I paid for the 320gb’s. For $400 I could replace the aging 320gb drives with 1TB drives and get a 3TB array. How cool would that be?
And roll on the backup issues once again.
