Hardware Upgrade

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New Raspberry Pi

For over 5 years now, BrewNode has been based upon the RaspPi 2. This has been creaking at the seams and limiting some software upgrades and features I wanted to add. It was time to bite the bullet and upgrade the hardware to a RaspPi 4. This facilitated a major upgrade to NodeJS. A fair amount of code had to be re-written or ported but it wasn’t a big problem.

As well as improving performance and new software capabilities, it appeared simple to add a touch screen display.

Touch Screen Display

Before this modification I used to connect to the RaspPi remotely and issue commands from a terminal. This works perfectly well but it would be a lot nicer to press a few buttons.  This could also have been done remotely but I thought a touch screen panel would be more fun and make the system self-contained.

I did need to get an angle grinder to cut a hole in the front panel. But it’s always satisfying playing with an angle grinder.

Forget all those other wires, only HDMI and USB required.

 

React Web App

Instead of using commands to drive the system, I wrote a simple web-app to provide some large buttons and display basic information.

This integrates with my Brewfather (@BrewfatherApp) account to display the recipe currently being brewed. More significantly it provides all process parameters, volumes, times and temperatures for the actual brew day.