

Automated home brewing system - bcl
https://decibel.ni.com/content/projects/the-wobbly-boot-pico-brewery/blog

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lancewiggs
The WilliamsWarn Nanobrewery <http://www.williamswarn.com> is the most elegant
solution to home brewing out there. The control system (which was done by a
company related to me), had to be complex enough to cope with everything going
on, simple enough to operate by anyone and flexible enough to allow the brewer
to create. I'm obviously biased - but the nanobrewery is getting great
reviews.

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maxerickson
Do you have any insight into their target market?

I'd be more inclined to mix the hobby of building the machine into the hobby
of brewing the beer than I would be to spend $6,000 on something off the
shelf. But I realize that's just me.

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jblock
NI had a section of demos like this at their technical conference this August.
They were all hobby projects. Things that engineers just thought "were cool"
and were stupidly easy to make with this hardware. There was a crane game, a
6-foot-tall aluminum slingshot controller for Angry Birds, and a compactRIO-
powered guitar amp.

It's startling to think of how much money/time engineers save with prototyping
and graphical system design software like this, and even though NI stuff
powers telescopes and water filtration systems and loads of other important
stuff, things like this come out and remind everyone that there's fun to be
had.

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MattRogish
I really like "The Electric Brewery". The plans are easily available and you
can buy all the parts from them and build it yourself (or, if that's not your
thing, you can buy the panel pre-built): <http://theelectricbrewery.com/>

It's a good combination of automation-where-it-hurts and still-hands-on-where-
it's-fun - some of the other ones seem too automated and take all the fun out
of it (we're homebrewers, not looking to start the next Budweiser).

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timdorr
An interesting approach. I wonder how much regularity he gets out of his
brews, given that everything's so tightly controlled.

Personally, I think part of the fun of homebrewing is coming up with your own
unique take on a recipe. The mishaps that create something weird in your beer
make for a good story.

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gregcohn
Anyone brewing any kind of volume would want successful variances (mishaps or
otherwise) to be replicable. Thus they would need to have a highly consistent
baseline (or at least be able to see and measure the variances) in order to
experiment with single variables.

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charlesju
Can I buy one?

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freiheit
There are automated home brewing systems available on the market already. Seem
to be 5-10 times the cost of a non-automated homebrew setup.

Here's the first I found with some random googling around:
<http://brewmation.com/Panels.html>

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gregcohn
This is amazing.

