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Brew the Perfect Beer

Brewing the perfect beer begins with the perfect ingredients. And the perfect ingredients begin with the malt: germinating the grain then drying it to develop flavour. Food dehydrators can do the job, but tend to get too hot destroying the enzymes important in fermenting the beer.

And who wants crap beer?

Enter the Arduino Malt Kiln.

Developed by Richard Oliver, the Malt Kiln uses an Arduino Uno and MegunoLink to run the kiln.

The Arduino monitors the temperature of the kiln. It turns a heater on and off to make sure the grain stays within preset limits.

An Interface Panel was developed with MegunoLink to adjust the temperature set-points. The Plotting tool was used to be sure the grain wasn’t damaged by excess heat and work out when it was ready to brew.

Check out Richard’s Malt Kiln build in our articles section.

Open the Garage with your Phone

Don’t get caught out in the rain. Open your garage with our Arduino Garage Gizmo.

The Garage Gizmo uses an EtherTen, an Arduino Uno compatible board with an Ethernet port. Plug it into a WiFi router and the small web-server inside the Garage Gizmo will be available as far as your WiFi can see. Attach the relay in the Garage Gizmo to your door opener, setup a password using MegunoLink then…

…visit the Garage Gizmo web-page with your phone next time you are caught out in the rain. Enter the password and smile smugly as the door glides open.

Fix that broken Air Conditioner with an Arduino

Air conditioners use a thermostat to regulate the room temperature. There’s just two problems:
1. The temperature sensor is in the air-conditioner. So really it is controlling the machine temperature, not the room temperature.
2. Thermostats break.

Inspired by Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson, Phil built a new thermostat for his office air conditioner.

A 3D-printed part fits over the air-conditioner’s control knob and is driven by a servo motor. An Arduino measures the room temperature using the servo to turn the air conditioner on if it is too hot, and off when it gets too cold.

MegunoLink controls the set-point where the temperature is just right. The Arduino sends all the vital statistics to MegunoLink for plotting so Phil can keep an eye on what’s happening.

Check out the Arduino air conditioner article for the build details or chill out with another MegunoLink project.

Energy Efficiency Monitoring

An energy efficient home is a happy home. But how efficient is your home?

An international team is developing R-Vis, a portable heat flux meter for measuring a building’s thermal properties. The meter uses sensors, communicating wirelessly, attached to the inside and outside the building to measure energy efficiency in changing conditions.