I've had mixed results recently working on HERMAN. Last week I began the process of re-plumbing the solenoid valves to tweak machine performance. This included having two water in valves (one dedicated to the mash tun and one dedicated to the HLT) after I found that reverse pressure would open them. The other change was brought about by installing the immersion chiller with agitator in the kettle. This meant I no longer needed to circulate kettle wort through a chiller until it reached pitching temperature. A side effect of this was that there was only one wort path out of the kettle (into the fermenter) compared to two previously.

I had to pull apart the valve that was part of the old kettle wort chilling loop and discovered a good deal of hop debris in it. I think it was a good move to eliminate this path. Now the chilled and settled kettle wort simply gets dropped via gravity into a fermenter. The valve and fermenter fill path will be sanitised at the start of brewing with Starsan or equivalent.

Through various plumbing changes I had a significant amount of trapped liquor. Revising the solenoid arrangement gave me the opportunity to add a low point valve (manually operated ball valve) for drainage. The changes also meant that the solenoids needed re-wiring.

All that seemed to progress quite well until it was time to connect everything up and test. The manual switches did not engage the relays and after about 15 seconds puzzling I noticed that a ribbon cable connecting the BrewTroller controls to the relay card was melting! I have no idea yet what was happening but this is one of the drawbacks of creating a complex vero-strip interface. I noticed one cable was not plugged in, but not sure why that would make a difference. At least the BrewTroller seems to be fully functional so that is a blessing. I'm eager to get a version 3 board with 16 outputs (assuming that will be the final arrangement) so that I can settle on some final interface designs and etch decent relay boards.

So at the moment I have a pretty looking set of solenoids that are not working.

Beyond that there were numerous small tweaks. This included improved plumbing between solenoids and tuns and changing the depth of the kettle temperature probe so that it is higher in the tun than the heating element. The idea is that when hot wort from the mash hits the probe, the BrewTroller can automatically apply kettle heating because the element will be covered. The BrewTroller control box was finally mounted properly with suitable placement of cables and space for the laptop to sit if so desired. I think pretty much every time I brew I will have the laptop running with BTremote just for the convenience of it.

I've managed to stockpile enough beer to last me through a longer phase of BT improvements so I'm in no hurry but rather wanting to apply good solutions rather than temporary ones. Assuming the relay interface board is actually ok, I think I will brew in two or three weeks. I'm aiming for a nice tasty American Pale Ale.

Beyond physical construction work, work has continued on the BTremote program. There have been a lot of tweaks communicating between BT and the PC and I'm nearly ready to release an update where recipes can be done reliably on the PC and downloaded to the BT. This means no more painful tweaking of the rotary encoder to add recipe names and set parameters. It is a great input option for a stand-alone device, but so much easier if you don't need to use the encoder for detailed input like setting up a recipe. My APA recipe was uploaded from the PC to the BrewTroller without even a tweak of the encoder, so a big step forward there.