Gonna redo the brewery. No more wood cart with tippy wheels. Will reuse alot of the current gear. Boil pot, HERMs pot, pump etc. Gonna replace the current controller with a win10 box running a custom labview program. Here is the start.
gonna get a 10" touch screen to mount into one of those boxes. 2 of those devices in the picture are an 8ch thermocouple and an 8ch DIO. both speak modbus via ethernet. technically I could mount the win10 box and the screen in a portable battery powered box and monitor/control the mash/brew from anywhere in the house. gonna be cool!
few more parts came in. 10" touch screen the little black box is the Win10 server! quad celeron 2ghz 4gig mem 64gig storage dual band wifi bluetooth 10/100/1000 ethernet port mini-HDMI port. (2) USB 3.0 ports. I love technology.
got a little more done on the control/server box. All the control logic will be done from this box, I will have another box with all the relays in it.
Gonna connect my heating elements for the herms, rims and boil kettle like this. Reasonably water tight and protects the wires from fingers (or dog noses). Uses a 1.5" triclamp.
Got some more wiring done on the control box. Haven't connected it to the relay box yet (mostly cause it isn't made yet. ) Added a 24vdc dc-dc converter for the I/O modules. Added some fans to keep the pc cool.
Little more work done. Heating element mounted to the tri-clamp and the tri- clamp bulkhead mounted to the HLT tank Leaking testing as we speak
Must be some electrical engineer in his blood. Pretty neat wiring work, and stuffing everything possible into each box. Well done, indeed. Neat is a good thing, and sure helps down the road for troubleshooting. Did you (are you) making any drawings for that as you build it? I'd bet there's more than one brewer out there that would pay pretty good money for one like it. I love fabricating things as well, but just don't have the time yet. Still catching up on all the honey-dos that piled up in a 40 year career of engineering, fabricating, installing, and inspecting things for someone else. Never had time for my own projects. Now I do, except for the little problem of all the other higher priority projects it takes to modernize a 50 year old house and clear up a couple acres that have been feral for 50 years. You know, that business before pleasure thing. But I get some pretty darn good ideas in this forum, that's for sure. This thing will definitely give a lot more control over temperature since it's analog and not waiting for a min/max temp to occur and close a contact. Anything that uses binary inputs for control will naturally oscillate. Can't stop it. A good PID loop with a little bit of integral gain will/should control the temperature within a degree or two of setpoint quite easily, possibly closer depending on the resolution and full scale of the inputs. Now ya gotta do the graphics showing the volumes, piping, pump status, heater/chiller status, etc. etc. etc. One word. Wonderware. One of the best HMI packages I've ever seen. Might be a little pricy, though. Haven't looked at it lately, but put a lot of HMI systems in with it through my career. I'm watching this now.
