Tilt Pi

[avantassel]

I prefer the raspberry pi over using the phone app since the phone app only sends when you are within bluetooth range of the Tilt in your fermenter. The Tilt communicates over bluetooth to save battery so you can use a Raspberry Pi to communicate with the Tilt and send the data over WiFi to BrewersFriend. Once you have a raspberry pi, here are some steps to set this up.

Download the Tilt Pi image

Download Etcher to burn the image to a micro sd card

Insert the micro sd card and plug in your raspberry pi with a keyboard and monitor to setup WiFi.

After it's connected to your WiFi, plug it in near your fermenter and open http://tiltpi.local:1880/ui

Under Logging > Cloud Settings, paste the Cloud URL from your brew session and hit enter to save it.

The Tilt Pi defaults to sending data every 5 minutes and will now send the gravity and temperature of your fermentation to BrewersFriend.

To test it right away, you can enter a comment and hit enter to send.

 

[ukbrewer@gmail.com]

I'll be brewing not this weekend, the next. I'll be using the pi as thats how I have it set up right now.

 

[rolandblais]

Is there a way to configure multiple cloud urls for the same Tilt? I haven't messed with TiltPi in ages.

Right now my pi pushes to 4 services - 2 google sheets, brewstat.us, and BrewersFriend

 

[ukbrewer@gmail.com]

I'm not sure about pushing to multiples, would be a nice feature.

 

[rolandblais]

I'm not sure about pushing to multiples, would be a nice feature.

"If I get a chance to this weekend, I'll see if my script will run in that environment; it should, as it just needs python."

So... Instead of the above, I leveraged the latest feature and added forwarders as outlined here, and there was no need to augment the TiltPI image in any way. TiltPI sends to BF, then the forwarders push the data to the google sheets I had set up already.

 

[Mark Farrall]

Create a second instance of titlpi on another set of ports? I think it's just a node project so should be easy to create a second instance. Challenge will come with getting all the ports for the second environment adjusted. Or get into the logging code and update it. I haven't seen that that it's an open project, so not sure what the status on that approach would be.

 

[KC]

I picked up a zero W and a SD with the flashed tiltpi image.

plug in your raspberry pi with a keyboard and monitor to setup WiFi

The Tiltpi image has a handy SETUP utility that should do all that configuration on the boot card from a laptop. I like that approach, especially for a headless R-Pi except 1) I don't want to install a new browser simply to use it, and 2) can't paste a BF link to it

Can anyone post what the wpa_supplicant and cloud_log json files look like when tiltpi creates them?

 

[rolandblais]

wpa_supplicant.conf:


country=GB
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
ssid="test"
psk="test"
}

cloud_log.json:
{"Color":"PURPLE","Comment":"rolandblais@gmail.com","Beer":["Test",true]}

There's nothing in the setup.html to add the BF Cloud URL. You have to change it after the pi is up & running by browsing to the web interface and clicking the menu in the upper left:

If you add an email address, it will log to google sheets even if you specify a CloudURL. I had to leave the email field empty, and then set my BF Cloud URL for it to work.

You can also ssh to the pi, but you have to turn it on 1st locally using raspi-config.

Cheers,

Roland

PS: fwiw TiltPI on a Zero was painfully slow for me when I was trying to use the web interface. On a PI3 it worked much more quickly. The zero however works great as a headless logging tool; details here and here, if you want to go that route.

 

[KC]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I went with the zero because I'm still limited on power and thought it would manage longer on a phone battery. Also, $10

There's nothing in the setup.html to add the BF Cloud URL. You have to change it after the pi is up & running by browsing to the web interface and clicking the menu in the upper left

Curious where the address ends up stored and if it could be added straight to the SD card

 

[rolandblais]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I went with the zero because I'm still limited on power and thought it would manage longer on a phone battery. Also, $10



Curious where the address ends up stored and if it could be added straight to the SD card

I just realized that I do use a PiHat that adds usb and ethernet ports, so I'm not sure if that overhead is the cause of slowness in my case.

I'll fire up the Pi 0 and poke around with it and see if I can find where the cloudurl is stored.

 

[KC]

This wpa_supplicant.conf worked for me:

country=us
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
 scan_ssid=1
 ssid="WiFi_ID"
 psk="WiFi_Password"
}

Yours should work too, may have been a character issue pasting the " symbol or line breaks. Or the country=GB part. Tiltpi settings so far have been equivalent to standard r-pi settings.

For anyone else following, there's an alternate approach if you have trouble with avantassel's steps 3 and 4.

Create the wpa_supplicant.conf file above in the flash drive /boot directory using a unix style text editor (not notepad) after flashing tiltpi, but BEFORE booting the pi. When pi boots from flash, it uses the conf file to setup wifi in its native eth settings, then deletes the conf file. If it's not right the first time, it screws up some keys and you have to re-flash.

To find the IP address of the tiltpi, log into your wifi router and look at the DHCP connections. The tiltpi is called tiltpi. Then you can go to http://<tiltpi_IP _Address>:1880/ui from a phone or laptop and finish configuration. The "tiltpi.local" naming doesn't always work.

 

[avantassel]

This worked for me, nice little command line UI,

sudo raspi-config

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md

 

[AHarper]

Brill info guys... thanks for sharing.
TAR very much.