Building A Recirculating Infusion Mash System For Your Brewing Pleasure

If you’re into all-grain brewing a little automation goes a long way. [Tom Hargrave] had his eye on a Recirculating Infusion Mash System (RIMS) but the price tag kept him from pulling the trigger. Recently he bit the bullet and built his own small and inexpensive RIMS for use with the 10 gallon cooler he uses as a mash tun.

Mashing is the part of brewing process that collects sugars from the milled grains. Water needs to move through the grain mash and should be kept within a narrow temperature window. This RIMS hardware does that automatically by combining a pump, the heating element from an electric water heater, and a temperature sensor. The wooden disc fits on the top of the mash tun and tubing lets the pump move the liquids as needed. The one thing missing from this build is the PID controller to automate the process. After the break we’ve embedded a video from a separate project that shows off how the PID control would work with a system like this one.

If you’re into automated home brewing you’ll also like this mini-batch brewing setup.

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Mess Of Wires Is Actually A One Instruction Computer

If you’re going to build your own computer, it probably wouldn’t do you well to exactly emulate the computer you’re looking at right now. The modern x86 and x64 chips that power your desktop or laptop contain hundreds of individual instructions, and the supposed RISC CPUs found in ARM-powered devices contain nearly as many. No, if you’re going to build your own computer you should make it easy on yourself, just as [Jack Eisenmann] did  when he built the DUO Compact, a one-instruction set computer made on a breadboard.

Instead of dozens or hundreds of individual instructions, a one instruction computer has – like its name implies – only one way of manipulating bits. For the DUO Compact, [Jack] chose a NOR and fork conditionally instruction. Each line of assembly written for the DUO Compact has four memory instructions: a source address, destination address, skip address 1, and skip address 2. [Jack] explains exactly how this operation can allow him to compute everything:

Three steps occur when executing the instruction:

  1. Load the byte at the first and second address. NOR these bytes together.
  2. Store the result of step 1 in the second address.
  3. If the result of step 1 was zero, then skip to the instruction at the fourth address; otherwise, skip to the instruction at the third address.

As if designing a one instruction computer built using only basic logic and memory chips wasn’t impressive enough, [Jack] went as far as writing an emulator for his system, a compiler, an operating system, and even a few programs such as a square root calculator and a text-based adventure game.

By any measure, [Jack] has finished an amazing build, but we’re blown away by the sheer amount of documentation he’s made available. He’s even gone so far as to write a tutorial for building your own DUO Compact.

You can check out a few videos of the DUO Compact after the break. Of course, if you’re looking for a project to tackle, you’re more than welcome to design a PCB from the DUO Compact schematic. We’d certainly buy one.

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Homebrew Computer Is 16 Bits Of Awesome

We’ve seen our share of homebrew computers over the years. Usually, these bare-bone systems use a small, early 80s-era microprocessor such as the Z80 or 6502. These little 8-bit machines are awesome, but somewhat limited in their capability. [BigDumbDinosaur] sent in a computer he’s been working on for a few years now featuring the infamous 65816 CPU – the same CPU found in the Apple IIgs, the Super Nintendo, and [Jeri Ellsworth]’s C-ONE computer.

The 65816 is a direct descendant of the venerable 6502 CPU found in the Commodore 64, Apple II, and just about every 80s microcomputer of note. [BigDumbDinosaur] chose the 65816 for its backwards-compatibility with the fun to program 6502 and the ability to use high clock rates and tons of address space for a very cool design.

After a ton of careful design and consideration, [BigDumbDinosaur]’s computer included a real-time clock, a watchdog timer, a serial port, 256kB of ROM, and 128kB of RAM.

It’s a really wonderful build, but [BigDumbDinosaur] isn’t done with this project yet. He’s working on version 2 of a 65816 computer that will use programmable ‘glue’ logic, a lot more RAM, have a SCSI interface (for a hard drive), and have preemptive multitasking.

An awesome job, and it’s wonderful to see the wonderful 65816 make its way into another homebrew computer. Now if only we could find a 68000-based homebrew computer…

Brewing Beer With LEGO

[Matt] sent in a set of YouTube videos walking us through his LEGO Mindstorms controlled brewery.

[Matt] is using a RIMS brewing setup that recirculates and heats the mash to extract more starch from the grain. This results in a Maillard reaction in the mash and creates a richer, maltier flavor.

To control his RIMS setup, [Matt] is using a LEGO Mindstorms brick with a few LEGO temperature sensors attached to his plumbing. The LEGO provides all the temperature and pump control for a proper RIMS setup, perfect for the homebrewer who doesn’t want to bother with an Arduino or other microcontroller board.

As a small aside, the astute Hackaday reader will note our beer hacks category is woefully underpopulated. It’s nearly summer now and the perfect time to start brewing. If you’ve got a beer hack, be sure to send it in.

After the break you can see all of [Matt]’s RIMS/LEGO brewery videos, or you can check out his YouTube channel.

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Your Guide To Building A Homebrew 6502 Computer

If you’ve ever thought about getting down to bare metal and building a homebrew computer from scratch [Garth Wilson] put up a great primer to the 6502, the same CPU found in Apple ][ computers, BBC Micros, Vic-20s, and the venerable Commodore 64 (a 6510 in the C64, but it’s close enough).

In his guide to building a 6502 computer, [Garth] goes over all the basics – what you want the computer to do, how to decode addresses, and other important technical requirements for getting a homebrew project running.

If that’s not enough, [Garth] directs his readers to the fabulous 6502.org forums  where just about every topic is discussed. The guys on the forum have a standardized I2C pinout for the 6502, allowing noobs to easily connect pre-designed keyboards, displays, and storage devices to their projects. There are a ton of tutorials on the 6502.org site, more than enough to get a homebrew project off the ground.

If you’d like to see what you can do with a homebrew 6502, check out the homebrew projects page featuring a 6502 Nixie clock and CLPD-based 65816 single board computer. There’s a treasure trove of information here, just waiting to be pulled from the vine.

Homebrew On The Rigol DS1052E ‘scope

We love our little Rigol 1052E oscilloscope. It’s seen us through some perplexing problems and loved being upgraded from 50 MHz to 100 MHz. We’ve always been pleased with its role dictating waveforms for us, but we never thought we’d see homebrew apps for our little ‘scope.

We’re not exactly sure who [Krater] is, but he’s been working on some homebrew development for the Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope. Right now the capabilities are somewhat limited; all programming is via PEEKs and POKEs. Still, this is a fairly impressive development.

This wonderful little ‘scope has already had some time in the limelight by being easy to upgrade to 100 MHz. Hopefully with the new capabilities (Tetris, somebody make Tetris), this scope will become a staple in workshops around the world.

A tip ‘o the hat goes to [Rainer Wetzel] for sending this one in. Check out the video after the break to see an almost-working game of Pong playing on the 1052E

EDIT: [krater] dropped into the comments to tell us about his blog entry. Keep up the good work.

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Run Unsigned Code On Any Xbox

A ton of people sent in the latest development on the Xbox homebrew front. A console hacker that goes by the name of [GliGli] released a new exploit that boots any Xbox into a Linux loader.

The hack requires some hardware – in this case an Xilinx CLPD. The hack works by sending a tiny reset pulse (no word on what ‘tiny’ means) that glitches the hardware and gets around the hash checks during boot. If that’s not technical enough for you, check out the readme on the project’s github.

This isn’t a silver bullet to cracking Xboxen wide open. The glitch only has about a 25% chance of success for each boot. The glitch also take a few minutes to boot into unsigned code. This being said, the hack works on all 360s, including the slim models that can’t be opened up with the JTAG method.

Check out the demo of one of the beta testers demonstrating the exploit after the break. Again, thanks to everyone for sending this one in.

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