Ghost busted

03May09

For those of you that have been following the progress of my brewing-computer efforts, namely the BrewzNET application, you may remember that I’ve been fighting a ghost in the machine for my grant control box that was throwing erratic sparge rates. I finally got up the courage today and hunted it down, although the effort left me covered in (metaphorical) slime and blood.

Much as I suspected, the root cause was poor machine-side variable management, meaning that I didn’t keep as good track of what variables got changed where as I should have. That is certainly a challenge when writing complex code for a PICAXE chip, even for a 28X1 that has substantially more capabilities than the lower-end versions.

For now I’ve band-aided the code by throwing in a couple GOTO statements that skip over the section that was causing the incorrect sparge rate calculations, and at some point in the not-too-distant future I’ll dissect the code and re-write it so the problems are truely fixed… but for now I am just content that my readings are good ones. That sets me up nicely to proceed with coding the trending / plotting classes so I can actually see a graph of the system statuses rather than just the “snapshot” control panel view.

Filed under: Brew gear, BrewzNET   |  Leave a Comment