My hops are exploding. The Nugget have climbed up to the top of their twine, and are now exploding with hop burrs. SHould get quite a good yield this year from them. Suprisingly enough, the Nugget might be rivaled by the Zeus for yield. I can’t believe how many hops these rhizomes are producing, even though its just the first year. I can’t wait until they are a couple years old. The Liberty and Magnums are barely burring at all, and the Japanese Beetles are really decimating the Liberty’s leaves. I suspect I’ll get nothing again from them this year.

This weekend we stopped by Steel and Metal Liquidators on Old Airport Road up in Newport. Holy crap, do they have alot of steel and aluminum. We picked up a whole bunch of scrap aluminum pieces for Donna to practice welding, and we also got the pieces cut for my grant skid… including some gorgeous diamond plate. I decided to go with aluminum for a number of reasons, not least of which was weight - Made from steel, the skid was going to weigh nearly 50 pounds! I did not want to have to drag that up and down the stairs, and aluminum will give me all the strength steel had without the back-breaking. Once Donna feels comfortable welding aluminum, she should be able to knock this out in an evening (I suspect).

Last but not least, I received the 2 315Mhz wireless units to play around with. They are tiny… check out the picture for a scale comparison to your standard bottle cap. I hope they work as I am expecting… and even if not, they’ll be fun to play around with. The more I read about the XBee, the more I think I’m gonna have to use them in a future version. They also have 10 bit analog to digital converters as well as several I/O lines which would increase the number of signals I could read / measure output beyond what the just the PICAXE chip offered.

…about wireless antenna design. That’s what I have come to realize. After placing that antenna spiral on the PCB, I decided it might be prudent to Google the subject matter of wireless antennas, and found this paper. Basically, the spiral probably wouldn’t have hurt anything, but its damn near worthless too. As a result, I ripped that trace off the main board design and instead put in a couple of pads to hook in a wire antenna, if I find it necessary. A question to the PICAXE Forum has somewhat alleviated my fears that the pump motors won’t distort the signal when they turn on and off, but I’ll have to do some real-time testing and see. Wireless may be a bust for this application… at least for now.

One upgrade I really must consider for the next iteration will be using the XBee hardware set. It operates at 2.4Ghz and is bi-directional, and appears to still be reasonably priced (as far as this stuff goes)… These chips come off-the-shelf with nice features like individual addressing and error checking built in. That would allow me to have multiple individual wireless transmitters in the grant, pump skid control box, main sculpture control box, and at the PC all working together - Wow. What a vision that is… Maybe just a pipe dream?

Getting back to the board, I also tweaked a few additional aspects of the design:

(1) I realized my 330, 10k and 22k resistor values got re-labled as 4K7 somewhere along the line, most likely the result of a poorly executed multi-select change. I would have soldered in the correct values, but the PCB artwork would have been wrong… Also could be confusing to anyone looking at the board design (not as if many will do that anyways)

(2) I put additional silkscreen layer descriptions on the +5V and GND rail pads

(3) I completely hid the unused pins for the ULN2803A Darlington driver rather than just moving them to the top layer. As I said before, I’m clipping those leads off the IC socket anyways… Why show them at all?

(4) I put in a slot for a .2″ pitch terminal connector over by the power supply. Before I solder that $16 fancy power supply and $3 fuse holder to the board, I’m going to first test it out using batteries. If there is a circuit problem, it will be safer for the components on the board if less juice is flowing through them. I’d rather hose a few batteries than have the power supply go BOOM and take the other stuff with it. Once the circuit is tested out and I begin using the VAA505 to power the circuit, those screw terminals could be used to power other 5V loads or whatever…

(5) Minor trace movements to provide more clearance, clean up ugliness, etc.

I am dying to pull the trigger and just make this happen… WHERE IS MY DRILL PRESS?!!?!? The sooner it gets here, the sooner I can etch, drill and solder my boards up… and the sooner I can start actually use this grant I’ve been designing for several months. Patience is starting to wear a little thin…

Alright, so I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I was looking at my main board during lunch and realize that a little reorientation of the power supply would better position the fan and power headers, as well as putting the sensor headers closer to the back of the control box (meaning less medusa factor). It puts the 120V AC traces towards the back of the control box and the weaker 5V at the front - also a very good upgrade.

That ended up freeing up alot of room at the top of the PCB, so I proceeded to route this snakey looking transmitter antenna through that area (as a just-in-case). This will let me do on-the-fly testing if the signal strength is weak, and if the PCB spiral isn’t enough then there is a pad at the end to solder in an external antenna too… That extra real estate also means I’ll have clearance to get the fuse in and out a little easier. I’m hoping I’ll never have to replace the fuse… but again, “just in case”.

I also realized I had 3 jumper wires for the sensor signals to accomodate the ground trace, which with a little rerouting and a different jumper trace for the onboard LM34 temperature sensor, I reduced the number of jumper wires by 2. That’s 4 less drill holes and 4 less soldering points.

I do wish there were a good alternative to the ULN2803A Darlington Driver IC…. its got 8 channels, and I’m only using 2 of them to drive the SSRs. I don’t think they make a DIP8 package version, so I’m probably stuck with the wasted space and pins. I am considering snipping off the posts of the IC socket that won’t be used, meaning I’ll only drill 6 holes for that IC instead of 18… and the the IC will remain whole since it’s plugging into a socket. Still a big waste of space, though. I suppose I could use a couple of single Darlington pair transistors to drive the SSRs… But I like the IC approach better.

The fact that my drill press isn’t here yet has yielded positive consequences so far - it gives me more time to obsess and refine my design before settling on something and producing the circuit. Who knows what this will look like if it takes another 2-3 weeks…

My batch of single-sided presensitized copper-clad boards arrived today from Allied Electronics and I am ready to etch my boards for the pump skid control box. These things are 9″x6″, so I will cut them down to smaller sizes as needed. I have found that both a jig saw and mitre saw do decent jobs, although both require a little grinding / filing after the fact to get the rough edges smoothed out. A couple passes with the Dremel takes care of that, no problem.

The pump skid circuit designs have gone through a few changes since I originally started working on them, and although most of you couldn’t care less and probably read this stuff as technobabble, I figure I’d go ahead and document where the design is and how it got there.

First off, I simplified my 3-board approach (sensor, control panel, and main board) into two boards, a main board w/ sensors and an auxiliary control panel board. This allowed me to reduce alot of jumper wires on the main board and simplify the overall design. I kept the control panel board seperate for a few reasons - If I find I want to change around the control panel I won’t need to re-etch the main board, and if the main board must change, I can at least (maybe) keep the control panel board the same. It also allows me to do a test etching / drilling / soldering on a much smaller scale than trying to tackle the main board first, which allows me to develop confidence and skills prior to the “main event”.

So here are some of the design thoughts that went into the current iteration of the main control board:

Power - The main board houses the power supply (Cosel VAA505) which can step down 120V AC to 5V DC in a single step. The board is protected by a 2A slow-blow fuse (as recommended by the manufacturer) which may not save my ICs in the event of a big problem, but it should at least protect the power supply. Power is fed into the board via a 3-pin .156″ header connection (much bigger and beefier than other header connections on the board).

Serial Communication - The standard 3.5mm (1/8″) stereo jack connection used to upload programs to the Picaxe chip (and receive feedback via the SERTXD command) has been replaced with 3-pin .100″ header connection that will connect a panel-mount stereo jack on the back of the control box. This will allow me to plug into the box without having to open it up and potentially expose myself to live electricity. This will be used infrequently to tweak the PICAXE code and will not be the primary mode of receiving data - for that I’ve included a place for a 315Mhz 2400 BPS wireless transmitter from SparkFun Electronics. Being wireless means the pump skid can sit close to the main brew sculpture and transmit data back to it without having a physical wire running between the two - one less tripping hazard to deal with.

Integrated Circuits (ICs) - There are 4 main ones on the board; The Picaxe 28X1 that functions as the heart of the automated functions, a CMOS 4001 quad nor gate to combine the “automatic” control signals generated by the Picaxe with the manual switch signals from the control panel, a ULN2803A Darlington driver to somewhat decouple the solid-state relay (SSR) signals from the rest of the circuit, and a DS1307 real time clock that is used to count elapse seconds between the filling & pumping operations. There is also an on-board LM34 digital temperature sensor that will report the internal control box temperature, although at this point it is more for information than anything else, and will show me if my cooling fan is undersized.

Headers - Good god, there are alot of them. There is 10-pin header that connects the main board to the control panel board, a couple 2-pin connectors for the SSR signals, loads of 4-pin headers for the sensor connections, and a few others thrown in. This board is gonna look like a nightmare medusa once everything is all connected up.

Resistors - There are really only 4 resistor values being used: a single 330 for the on-board power LED that mostly just provides the circuit with a means to de-energize when turned off, 4k7 for switch and sensor signals, and the obligatory 10k and 22k resistors for the Picaxe download circuit.

Misc. Empty Pads - there are a few places where I put pads in for “just in case” circumstances. There is a place for a decoupling capacitor in case my Picaxe gets fritzy once everything is running (I’ve never tested the whole design together, and weird things might happen). There are several tie-ins to the 5V and Ground rails in case I need to add something else (like more smoothing or decoupling capacitors), and pads for the unused input and output legs of the Picaxe. I also put in a place for a crystal resonator, although I expect it will be unused since the 28X1 has an internal resonator - again, it is a just-in-case. The wireless transmitter has a pad next to it for an auxiliary antenna in case the signal strength sucks at 10 feet. I sure hope not, but you never know.

Some things I would like to change (but not in this version) are:

(1) Improved plugs for the level and temperature sensor switches. While phone jacks work and are readily available from my Home Depot, they are not very robust. Since I order so many components online anyways, I should really have spent more time identifying the correct plugs to use.

(2) Use of a MCP23008 or 016 I2C I/O expansion IC to localize the control panel functions and reduce Picaxe pins used to a couple I2C connections (instead of a 10-pin header). This would also free up more digital I/Os on the Picaxe, and I could actually use 2 more analog channels to take temperature readings (maybe some LM34s mounted directly on the SSRs).

(3) Make the main board double-sided to eliminate the jumper wires and reduce the overall size requirements. I know the layout is currently sub-optimized, but given my level of inexperience in this whole process, I think I did pretty well this time around.

(4) Use a backlit 20×4 LCD screen on the control panel to display temperatures, elapsed time, estimated sparge rates, etc… I have the component, but since this totally gratuitous it can wait for the second iteration to come around.

(5) Make the signals from the grant vessel to the main control box wireless - this would eliminate 3 holes and a ton of jumpers & wiring. It would also require me to rethink the grant design a bit because it would need onboard (battery) power and its own PCB, but how friggin cool would that be. Not only could it transmit its data to the pump skid control box, but it could also send it to the main brew sculpture. The only problem with that approach is the control box would still need to send its signal as well to indicate the pump statuses, internal box temps, and manual switch statuses… So I would need to figure out how to prevent data collisions… and it wouldn’t be possible using the wireless gear I linked to above from Sparkfun. Again, a longer-term development item.

I’ll try to take some pictures as I prototype the boards so I can give you all a better idea of what the PCB process is (for those that haven’t seen it). That post probably won’t come until later in the month when the Dremel drill press has arrived…

Well, I’ve got a few weeks where I know I can’t focus on the electronics portion of my pump skid develoment… The drill press holder for my Dremel is backordererd until sometime in late July, and I just ordered 4 6″x9″ pre-sensitized single-sided PCBs from Allied Electronics that should be arriving on Monday… while I could use the double-sided ones that were sent to me in error, I’d rather save them until later when I am more proficient and ready to tackle 2-sided boards. I have made some inroads on PicaxeVSM to DipTrace inroads thanks to some guidance from Arnie Wierenga, and now can take my simulated circuits and move the net list / air wires into the PCB program with greatly minimized error potential. I have also learned to take the “autorouter” feature of DipTrace with a grain of salt, because the truth is that often times a human eye can do things much better than the PC, despite its computing power. Small shifts in component locations can greatly simplify the traces, particularly by runnings them >>under<< resistor artwork (between the two end pads) instead of a sea of jumper wires… but I digress into geekdom. Sorry about that.

At any rate, since I am gonna hang up pimpin’ my electronic brew gear for a few weeks, I am really getting an itch to brew some more… my empty kegs continue to multiply, and are begging to be full. I’m planning 10 gallons of American Brown this coming weekend, and will hopefully get in a good batch or two of belgians before our August 10th vacation to Disneyworld. I don’t really want to leave the belgians during primary fermentation while we’re away… but want to have plenty of beer in secondaries and maybe a primary fermentation winding down when we walk out the door.

Another busy weekend of projects, although this time it was at home instead of my Parent’s house. After 3 years of fighting limited power availability in my basement “brew room”, I finally took the initiative to install more outlets on an existing 20A circuit. Its crazy, but the existing one only had a single, extremely inconveniently placed outlet that never gets used; I pulled wire from the panel box all the way back to the outlet and put in a 6 new outlets. I can actually plug in my wireless router, phone charger, stir plate, grain mill, yeast fridge, and a few other devices without having to gang several power strips and extension cords together. It also allows me to get some stuff up off the area I typically work at when doing soldering and wiring work.

The entire circuit is also GFCI protected, which apparently is a relatively new code requirement for basement, garage, kitchen and bathroom circuits… One that our contractor did not follow when he finished our basement several years ago (cringe). I also swapped out the first outlet in our new garage circuit with a 20A GFCI to comply with code… One of these days I really should get a copy and read it cover to cover and see what else should be done.

The most frustrating and time consuming part of the entire project was trying to drill holes big enough to anchor some things to our basement concrete walls, which have been curing for nearly 20 years old at this point. That concrete was so hard I had to borrow a hammer drill from my neighbor down the street to make it happen, and even then it took several hours, an arsenal of drill bits, and a few battery re-charges to make it happen. I was drenched in sweat when it was all over.

I did get one minor brewing-related item accomplished - I racked my most recent pale ale to secondaries where it is currently resting comfortably atop 1/4oz Amarillo and 1/4oz Summit whole hops. I am a little nervous about what the Summit will do as a dry hop - but so far it smells very nice with heavy citrus (orange / tangerine) aromas. So long as the Summit doesn’t impart a funky hop flavor, I’ll be really happy. And yeah, that’s one of the new outlets peeking out from behind the carboy there.

I’m hoping to brew another 10 gallons of American Brown this coming weekend. I saved the WLP001 yeast from this pale batch and will re-pitch - perhaps building up even more yeast for a 20 gallon batch yet to be brewed. I am also thinking about going Belgian soon while I’ve got the hotter temperatures - Maybe a nice amber / brown beer using pureed dried plums as a late-addition kettle sugar… Or perhaps a nice summery low octane wheat with belgian overtones. We’ll see.

Crazy weekend. We went down to my parents’ retirement home on Lake Gaston in NC this past weekend. I brought down my 2-tap draft box along with a keg of brown porter and a keg of american wheat - both were nearly gone after 3 days. My entire family was there - all 3 sisters and their significant others, and they were thirsty. The draft box worked awesome from the very first pour - I was ecstatic and can’t wait for another opportunity to use it. The beer definitely helped the multitude of projects go by faster - Installing laminate flooring, assembling furniture and bookshelves, disassembling a beaver domicile (!!!), and several other odd jobs.

We returned on Monday evening to find that the heavy storms we had driven through going down to NC on Friday had obviously found there way to Delaware as well - My Magnum and Zeus hop trellises had both collapsed from the high winds. The Magnum trellis was easily fixed, however the Zeus required much more extensive reinforcement and repair - That sucker definitely ain’t coming down again after the work we put into it tonight. Fortunately none of the vines seemed worse for the wear, so I am optimistic that they will recover just fine. I also came home to find that the Japanese Beetles are coming out… SUCK! They are really digging into my Liberty again, and I can’t say I am looking forward to another season of fending them off. I hate beetles.

Haven’t done any significant work on my pump skid control box since a week ago, although I did find some time to do a test etching of a printed circuit board. It turned out decent for a first time - I found a few things in my technique that need tweaking (and lead to thin traces), however I feel pretty confident my next attempt will be excellent.

… But not the homebrewing type. I’ve been collecting the necessary tools to venture into home Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing, such as drlll bits, exposure sources, and developing & etching chemicals. At this point I have got pretty much everything except a drill press for my dremel, which is on backorder and should arrive sometime during July. I’ve got 100 micro-sized bits of various sizes for making the PCB holes, With 50 or so of them falling into the typical 0.030 to 0.035 inch range (the most common size for PCB components). I think the full range of sizes is like .0135 to .0465 inches, or something like that.

Why so many? These things are tiny, and they break relatively easily. I’m expecting that I’ll be producing a few boards over the next few years, and chances are that I’ll go quite a few. I included a close-up shot of the drill bits here to give you a little perspective … notice the dime, then check out the width of the bits. The smallest are basically the size of a hypodermic needle - you could easily stab yourself with them if you weren’t careful….

I was hoping to do my first trial run at etching a circuit board sometime this week, but with the weekend rapidly approaching and us taking a trip down to NC to visit my parents, it most likely won’t happen. Even if I exposed and etched my boards this week, I wouldn’t actually be able to drill them all that efficiently until the press comes in anyways - so I’m not in a huge hurry.

I say that, but I really can’t wait to debut this little monstrosity of homebrewed technology. Its so cool and so excessive and so… well, me. Quite simply put, it is very me.

The 9 or so gallons of American Pale I got from Sunday’s 20 gallon batch is fermenting quite nicely downstairs. It will most likely be done by Thursday, and I’ll transfer it to secondaries sometime mid next week. We also recently killed my keg of Saison du Sevier and put the American Raspberry Wheat on tap, which is quite a wonderful beer - Very flavorful, and incredibly clear for a wheat beer - both yeast and protein / chill haze are mostly absent. I think this has made my mind up that wheat beers are not necessarily cloudy, nor have to be in order to taste fantastic.

So today I brewed 20 gallons of american pale ale with my friends Heidi and Dave. It was a new pale ale recipe that used Amarillo, Centennial, and Summit hops along with a few different specialty grains for character (Vienna, Carapils and Crystal 40). Things went relatively well - stuck mash, but as soon as re-mixed and re-vourlafed everything went super smooth. I’m finding that a minor stuck mash seems pretty common with this system because I tend to load it with to much water (b/c the room is available in the 28 gallon tun)… so I end up with 12-16 inches ontop of the grain bed, which weighs heavily and sticks it pretty quickly (within 4-5 gallons of runoff). The remixing & additional recycle only lost us about 20 minutes, so it certainly wasn’t tragic - I just chalk it up as a minor annoyance.

We boiled hard and came up a gallon short in the fermenters, which I really should have expected. Its not the first time this has happened with my 20 gallon system. For 90 minute boils I need to just make it part of the routine to add a gallon back around the 30 minute mark, once the room is available in the kettle again. As a result our easy-drinkin’ 1.050 beer is a 1.057 and will probably not be quite as summer-y as intended.

Work on the grant electronics has been progressing well. I want to give an update but I’m saving it for when things are a little more complete than they are now. I am slowly gathering the tools required to print and drill my own circuit boards… which is one of the final pieces of this effort. The enclosure is prototyped in plexiglass, which I may ultimately move over to a metal enclosure -but we’ll see how spent I am after the prototype is ready and has been used a few times. It is a huge PITA.

Looks like it might be a decent year - All my hops seem to be doing pretty well, and no major problems so far. I need to put some more fertilizer on them since it has been a few months, but that won’t take very long.

The Liberty, which I was concerned might be a lost cause, has really come up in full swing this year after being transplanted from a significantly less sunny spot in the back yard. I always wondered if the rhizomes were sickly or something, but it appears no - they just didn’t get enough sun before. The Nugget are growing like gangbusters (as usual) and are within 5 feet of the top of the twine…. The Magnum next to them are less prolific, but still growing very well and I’m sure will give me a bigger yield than last year.

The Zeus is only in its first year, but the middle vine is nearing the top of the trellis already. Even the shoot that got battered by the wind & lost its primary shoot’s tip has sprouted some new shoots and is slowly climing, albeit slower than its brothers. The trellis support is apparently lacking - I need to use some bigger metal plates to hold the two 8′ 2×2s together next year. It is looking kind of droopy - but I am hoping it can hold on for this season and I’ll shore it up with alot more screws & bigger metal braces next year. If it starts to look even worse, I’ll probably have to get up on a ladder and do an ad-hoc adjustment - I’ll play it by ear. I guess I should have known better than to use those skimpy little 4″ braces…. The tendancy to twist right at that joint has got be pretty substantial… particularly after a few good storms of rain & wind. At least the hops seem happy, even if their support is kind of ugly.