SparkFun Kegerator Goes To Eleven

sparkfun-kegerator

It started with a simple need: keep tabs on SparkFun Electronics’ in-house kegerator so the beer won’t run out at inopportune times. But of course SparkFun and “simple need” make strange bedfellows…throw beer in the mix, and you know this can’t end well. The result, as you might imagine, reads like a who’s-who of electronics hackery buzzwords.

Arduino? Check. Custom PCB? Check. Web interface? Check. Twitter feed? Check.

They’ve assembled a nice build tutorial on how this all went together, including code, example circuits, an explanation of some of the sensors used, and links to other tutorials for such things as Twittering and persistent storage in EEPROM using Arduino. Not to mention the eye candy: a custom Arduino shield (solder mask and all), custom acrylic tap handle, custom SparkFun pint glasses. They never do anything halfway, do they?

19 thoughts on “SparkFun Kegerator Goes To Eleven

  1. A circuit board for Sparkfun costs $2.50 per square inch. That is less than $10 for an arduino shield. If I was to build something by hand that was supposed to last for a long time And plug into a shield, it would take more than 1 hour of my time. As such, building a PCB for this application is totally acceptable.

  2. Seems like everybody’s quick to bash this because of the Arduino/Twitter/et al, BUT I think there’s some real impressive problem solving of actually measuring beer levels (the flex pressure sensors). Sure is a hell of a lot cheaper than an industrial scale that’ll support all that weight and still have some sort of output you can easily read.

  3. i’m sorry, kegbot.org takes the cake on this one.

    been running it for awhile now. implements a web interface to track beer poured per user, ibutton/rfid user authentication, flowmeter measuring, twitter reporting, arduino and django based.

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