When I first joined the BrewTroller group the philosophy was 'let's build a stand-alone controller without the need for a computer attached'. It is a great philosophy, but it doesn't logically follow that you should never connect a computer to a stand-alone machine. Once the BT guys captured the vision for a PC app to enhance the BT, the coding for BTremote gathered momentum.

An early release of the program is available on Google code. Currently it shows information on a display panel that is more versatile than using the BT LCD. Information can also be streamed live to a web page for viewing on wap enabled phones and other mobile devices. I use my PDA to keep an eye on what the machine is doing while I am away from it. Soon the code will include graphing of data.

The development path will take us to remote control via ftp which is an exciting prospect. This may not be a great idea currently because the BT still has some fine-tuning before it will work automatically.

While these ideas bubble away in the background I've been thinking about a schematic layout view of the machine. A visual always provides better information than numbers in my opinion. Anyway I'd initially thought the simplest way to implement a schematic was to have different static images for each configuration for the machine in question. The BTremote app would then switch in whichever image is relevant.

One of the BT strengths is that it is very versatile, catering to vastly different machine layouts. For this reason each user is likely to need different images for each of their valve configurations. Asking people to draw these images with a wide array of 'paint' programs and incentive or ability seems problematic. Add to this that a number of switching configurations can be active at once and it becomes a nightmare to administer.

So I got to chatting with my friend Garrett who has done substantial work on his layout designer. As the BT crew renewed my enthusiasm for coding, my interest in Garrett's code has sparked his enthusiasm. There is still a long way to go, but I'm really excited about the potential of his work to enhance BTremote. You can see below a screen shot of my layout looking a lot prettier thanks to Garrett's rendering compared to my earlier schematic images.

So the open source brewing community seems to be humming along with lots of exciting developments in rapid time. As big Kev here in Australia used to say, "I'm excited!".