Brewers Dashboard

[nohandslance]

Ready to make the purchase on this in-house, and remote tank monitoring system. Looking for a few more opinions and feedback from current users.
Thank you in advance.

Lance
Tonopah Brewing Co.
Nevada, USA
lancejergensen@gmail.com
775.997.6411

[515Dave]

I built my own, admittedly much more limited, system that does many of these things, but if you're not inclined to spend some time with a soldering iron and a compiler, that looks pretty slick too.

From the specs, it looks like they use thermistors for temperature measurement, which I'm not a huge fan of. RTDs would be better. For less critical things, I like using onewire temp probes, which are super cheap, and super easy to wire up. So cheap (2-3 bucks a piece) I monitor a bunch of things with them that I wouldn't otherwise care about to log, like ambient room temperature, cooler temps, glycol bath temp etc. Calibrating them is important, but they seem to be fairly accurate, cross referencing them with other sensors and calibrating with reference thermometers.

Aside from that, from the systems design perspective, I'd also be cautious about putting all of your brewery eggs in one basket, as it were, with no redundancy if something breaks. Even if it's not a direct component in the system design - for instance a network switch or power supply - there is plenty of opportunity for one bad thing to happen that takes out the whole system. There's something to be said for having an individual temp controller on each tank. A failure of one component results in one tank not functional (and hopefully easily replaced). Losing a complicated embedded system could render your whole brewery inoperable. There is also the issue of exposing your brewery operation to the internet, if you're paranoid about such things (and, quite frankly, you should be).

Having good support from a vendor, and probably a second opinion from a network security person, in that case, is absolutely critical.

Just my .02

Dave

[Myke J]

Ready to make the purchase on this in-house, and remote tank monitoring system. Looking for a few more opinions and feedback from current users.
Thank you in advance.

Lance
Tonopah Brewing Co.
Nevada, USA
lancejergensen@gmail.com
775.997.6411

Upslope Brewing in Boulder has been using it for a while and loves it. After talking with the developers and the guys at Upslope, we are planning on installing it in our new brewhouse as well.

[Montanaandy]

Brewers Dashboard

Saw this at CBC and spoke with the developers. Looks very nice. I believe that Ska in Durango, CO has used the system for quite some time so you might want to give them a call.

Andy

Ready to make the purchase on this in-house, and remote tank monitoring system. Looking for a few more opinions and feedback from current users.
Thank you in advance.

Lance
Tonopah Brewing Co.
Nevada, USA
lancejergensen@gmail.com
775.997.6411

[Buster]

I worked with Joel at Infinite Automation on developing this. We have been very happy with it and it is very effective. I helped to develop it from a brewers perspective, not from a software developers perspective. We are still on the original version and use it on an hourly basis. I am sure that the newer version is even more user friendly. It took us a lot of time and energy to develop and implement it and look at that as your advantage. It is much easier to implement and use since we did the legwork.
Contact anyone on the brewer or cellar staff at Ska and they can tell you about it. So far, the worst thing that has happened was we lost internet to the building and we couldn't see what was happening. The computer plugged along and when the internet was restored, everything updated and was just fine.

Cheers,

Matt Vincent

https://www.skabrewing.com

https://www.skafabricating.com