Keezer Controller Keeps The Kegs Pouring

August 14, 2019 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

It’s always a good idea to keep a few brews in the fridge ready to go, but being able to offer your guests a fresh-poured draught beer is another step above. It’s not trivial, but with a few kegs, a freezer and the right CO2 parts, it’s achievable for the average hacker. [Ben Brooks] had a keezer (keg freezer) setup that had been doing the job quite well, but wanted to take things up a notch.

Wishing to know when it was time to start brewing more beer, [Ben] needed a way to measure how much was left in the individual kegs. Opting to weigh them, initial experiments with a hand-made capacitive sensor failed when moisture in the freezer began to ruin the sensor’s performance. Switching to a strain-gauge based setup enabled more accurate readings to be taken with no drift over time. Solenoids were added to enable the taps to be shutdown outside of beer o’clock, and a Particle Photon and Raspberry Pi were put to work to give the whole project a slick web interface. There’s even a monitor to show guests what’s on tap!

It’s a tidy improvement to a home keg setup, and ensures [Ben]’s guests won’t be left thirsty in the middle of a party. We’ve seen other instrumented beer rigs before, too. If you’re working on your own homebrewing masterpiece, be sure to drop us a line.

Beer Kegs Make Excellent Resin Dispensers

December 26, 2015 by Will Sweatman 18 Comments

[Josh Updyke] woke up one morning and found himself in a sticky situation. The demand for his modular robotic track system was outgrowing his ability to produce. One of the bottlenecks was weighing out resin. It’s a slow, monotonous process that must be done with accuracy. The free market did not have any affordable solutions to the problem. So like any hacker worth his weight in 2N2222 transistors, he made his own by re-purposing some used beer kegs.

The resin comes in two parts – the resin itself and a hardener. Each must be weighted out on a scale before mixing to ensure proper proportions. It was a trial-by-error learning process before [Josh] was able to settle on a final solution. First he tried some garden sprayers, which worked OK at first. But the resin was taking too long to exit the sprayers, and he had to pressurize them by manually pumping them with air. He ended up with a much better method that used some Cornelius Kegs.

Be sure to check out his io page for more details.

Over Engineered Kegerator Is Glorious

December 13, 2013 by Adam Fabio 12 Comments

keger

When [Joey] decided to build a kegerator, he didn’t skimp. No commercial unit or simple kit would do. [Joey] wanted complete temperature monitoring, with a tap on the kegerator itself and a cooled tap remotely mounted at his bar. He started with a box freezer, which was a bit short for his purposes. Not a problem, as [Joey] cut an extended collar for the freezer from HDPE on his shopbot. The new collar gives mounting points for the beer lines, gas lines, as well as all the electronics.

Temperature control is handled by a commercial controller, however temperature monitoring is another thing altogether. An Arduino sits in a custom aluminum case on the outside of the kegerator. The Arduino reports temperature, beer type and also controls the cooling system for the beer lines. The cooling system alone is incredible. [Joey] designed everything in CAD and cut the parts out on his shopbot. Two fans sit in an aluminum air box. One fan is used to push cold air out from the freezer around the beer line. A second fan pulls air back in, keeping the kegerator/line/tap air system a (relatively) closed loop. The entire line set is insulated with 2″ fiberglass flex duct.

Temperature data and trend graphs can be monitored on the web, and [Joey] is using a Raspberry Pi to create a wall mounted status screen for his bar room. We love this build! [Joey] we’d buy you a beer, but it seems like you’ve got that covered already!

Kitchen Island Monitors And Distributes Home Brew Beer

November 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

This piece of furniture actually resides in [Matt Pratt’s] livingroom but we think it would make a perfect kitchen island. The base is a chest freezer modified to keep the beer inside at just the right temperature. But this doesn’t just dispense the beer, the system is designed to tell you how many pints are left in each keg.

The freezer offers enough room for four five-gallon Cornelius kegs. [Matt] salvaged the weight sensors from some cheap bathroom scales and rigged them up with some plywood discs to serve as the base for each keg. After working out the electronics to reliably read from the sensors (which was no small job) he hooked them up to a microcontroller and a touch screen. As you can see in the video after the break, the system calculates the number of pints left in each keg based on its weight. This can be easily calibrated using the touch screen.

He didn’t talk all that much about the control hardware, but having see his post about ARM LCD dev boards we’d bet that’s what he’s using here.

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5-keg Tap System Treats Your Home Brew Right

September 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

One of the biggest expenses when moving to a kegging system for your homebrew beer is finding a way to keep it cold. [Sanchmo] took a traditional route of using a chest freezer, but a bit of extra effort made the ordinary looking appliance into a 5 tap showpiece in his livingroom.

Home brewing is most often done in five gallon batches, so Cornelius kegs (for soda) work perfectly. The chest freezer used here has plenty of room for five of them and a canister of carbon dioxide. A temperature controller (something along these lines) turns the freezer into a refrigerator. But to make it beautiful [Sanchmo] hit the wood shop pretty hard. He screwed a sheet of plywood to the lid and then trimmed it out, along with a tower to hold the taps. This was further accented with the inclusion of some LEDs for effect.

We did find one word of warning in the Reddit discussion. It’s possible that the original metal housing of the freezer is used as a heat sink which is now covered in wood paneling. We’re not sure if this is true of this particular model or not, but some investigation is warranted if you’re thinking of building your own.

Doomsday Keg Of Radness Helps Ring In The New Year

December 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 3 Comments

doomsday-keg

Lots of people buy noise makers for New Year’s eve, others opt to sing Auld Lang Syne – then there’s these guys.

The crew at Stone Brewing Company throw an annual bash at their brewery in celebration of New Years, and while [Dino’s] countdown timer is great for intimate settings, they needed something bigger to wow the crowd. A busted half barrel was all the inspiration they needed to build the “Doomsday Keg of Radness”.

[Mike Palmer], the Creative Director at Stone handed the keg off to the maintenance crew for some remodeling, and got ready to fit it with all sorts of lights and other goodies. Holes drilled in the keg were fitted with bright pulsing LEDs, while additional LED light strips were laid out around the perimeter. The bottom was cut out to accommodate a Moonflower LED module, and a 24” monitor was strapped to the side in order to display a countdown timer. An old Macbook jammed inside the keg runs the video display, while the rest of the lighting is remotely controlled with an RF transmitter.

Now mind you this all went down last year, but since the display was such a hit, they will be busting it out again for the 2011 celebration.

Check out the short demo video below to get a look at the Doomsday Keg in action.

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Keep All Eyes On Your Kegerator With This Light Up Gauge Cluster

June 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

kegerator_gauge_cluster

A few years back [Evan] built a kegerator from a mini fridge and was quite happy with his new beer chiller. Like many of us do, he started thinking up ways in which he could improve the project as soon as it was completed. While it took a couple of years, he recently got around to adding the temperature and capacity gauges he always wanted.

He added a temperature probe to the refrigerator, and then constructed a pair of tools that he could use to measure how much beer was left in the keg. The volume monitors include a scale built using a pair of pressure sensors from SparkFun, and a flow sensor installed in the beer line.

[Evan] scored an old Chevy gauge cluster and cleaned it up before installing a pair of analog meters which he used to show the keg’s temperature and “fuel” level. Since he feels no project is complete without some LED love, he added a few of them to the display without hesitation. The LEDs calmly pulsate when the keg sits idle, but spring to life and begin flashing when the flow sensor is activated.

As evidenced by this pair of keg monitoring systems, we think that you can never have enough information when it comes to your beer stash, so we really like how this project came together.

Be sure to check out his kegerator’s gauge cluster in the video below.

Continue reading “Keep All Eyes On Your Kegerator With This Light Up Gauge Cluster” →