Manufacturing Your Own Single-Origin Tea

October 2, 2017 by Sean Boyce 33 Comments

It’s nice to take a break from hacking together the newest bleeding-edge technology, relax, and enjoy a beverage. It’s no surprise that hacks devoted to beer and coffee roasting are popular. We’ve also seen a few projects helping brew the perfect cup of tea, but none involving the actual production of tea. Today we’re going to take a short recess from modernity and explore this ancient tradition.

Consumption of tea is about equal to all other manufactured beverages, such as coffee and alcohol, combined. It is hands-down the most popular manufactured beverage in the world, and we thought it would be interesting to make some ourselves. Also the local tea is so bitter that it’s used to clean things, and it works alarmingly well. To each their own!

I started by driving into Vietnam’s Central Highlands, down what Google simply refers to as ‘unnamed road’, to about 11°52’59.3″N 108°33’49.5″E. I asked around until I found a street vendor that knew a farmer at the nearby tea plantation, and would sell us five kilograms of fresh tea. I carried it 330 kilometers back to the city, because I’m a sane person that does normal things.

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Measuring Alcohol Content With Time Of Flight Sensors

March 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 54 Comments

[Chris] is a homebrewer – the tasty kind – and wanted a way to track the rate of specific gravity against temperature. Tracking temperature is easy, all you need is a 1-wire temperature probe hooked up to the microcontroller of your choice. Logging the rate of fermentation isn’t as simple, but with a time of flight sensor, a hydrometer, and some pool toys, [Chris] kludged something together that works reasonably well.

Specific gravity, and thus fermentation, has been measured for centuries with hydrometers. Not wanting to complicate matters with electronic sensors, [Chris] built a floating cage for his hydrometer out of a clear tube, a kick board, and a few bits of styrofoam. By placing a Sparkfun time of flight sensor at the top of the tube, and lowering the hydrometer into his fermentation bucket, [Chris] can measure the height of the hydrometer above the level of the liquid in his fermentation bucket.

Both the temperature and specific gravity are logged to a Raspberry Pi, and after combing through this data [Chris] can see a big ‘bump’ in the specific gravity due to a mass of foam, tapering down to the desired values after a day or so.

Hacklet 35 – BeagleBone Projects

February 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 2 is just barely a month old, and now that vintage console emulation on this new hardware has been nailed down, it’s just about time for everyone to do real work. You know, recompiling stuff to take advantage of the new CPU, figuring out how to get Android working on the Pi, and all that good stuff that makes the Pi useful.

It will come as no surprise to our regular readers that there’s another board out there that’s just as good in most cases, and in some ways better than the Pi 2. It’s the BeagleBone Black, and for this edition of the Hacklet, we’re focusing on all the cool BeagleBone projects on Hackaday.io.

So you have a credit card sized Linux computer and a small, old LCD panel. If it doesn’t have HDMI, VGA or composite input, there’s probably no way of getting this display working, right? Nope. Not when you can make an LCD cape for $10.

[Dennis] had an old digital picture frame from a while back, and decided his BeagleBone needed a display. A few bits of wire and some FPC connectors, and [Dennis] has a custom display for his ‘Bone. It’s better than waiting for that DSI display…

[THX1082] is making a bed for his son. This isn’t your usual race car bed, or even a very cool locomotive bed. No, this is a spaceship bed. Is your bed a space ship? No, I didn’t think so.

Most of the work with plywood, MDF, paint, and glue is done, which means the best feature of this bed – a BeagleBone Black with an LCD, buttons, a TV, and some 3D printed parts – is what [THX] is working on right now. He’s even forking a multiplayer networked starship simulator to run in the bed. Is your bed a starship simulator?

Beer. [Deric] has been working on a multi-step fermentation controller using the BeagleBone Black. For good beer you need to control temperatures and time, lest you end up with some terrible swill that I’d probably still drink.

This project controls every aspect of fermentation, from encouraging yeast growth, metabolization of sugars, and flocculation. The plan is to use two circuits – one for heating and one for cooling – and a pair of temperature sensors to ensure the beer is fermenting correctly.

If you’re looking for more BeagleBone Projects, there’s an entire list of them over on Hackaday.io with GLaDOs Glasses, Flight Computers, and Computer Vision.

3 Liter Homebrew Beer Keg

June 4, 2008 by Sean Percival 15 Comments

Beer kegs are several things. They are expensive, heavy, but most importantly delicious. We found a nice guide for creating your own 3 liter beer keg. This is an inexpensive solution for homebrewers looking to keg their own beer.

The guide goes into detail on assembly and parts needed to create the bottle adapter. Most of the parts can be picked up locally or through MoreBeer.com. CO2 cartridges are used to pressurize the bottle. To keep everything cool you can use a standard water cooler with a few simple modifications. The 3 liter bottle is too tall for some coolers so you’ll need to cut a hole in the lid. Add a piece of aluminum covered styrofoam to the top and bottom, toss in some ice, and your brew should stay cold for about 3 hours.

The author does note that this is not recommended for long term storage. So drink up!