This week on Homebrewing DIY, I talked to Lee Bussy about a really cool new open-source brewing project – Brew Bubbles. Brew bubbles is a (do-it-yourself); build your own electric airlock that can essentially tell you when your fermentation is started and ended.
Links:
Lee Bussy’s Website: http://brewbubbles.com
His project link: http://brewpiremix.com
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Show Transcript
AI created it will have many errors
Colter Wilson: This week, we’re going to talk about a really cool new open source brewing project. This week, we’re going to talk about brew bubbles. Brew bubbles is a, do it yourself. Build your own electric airlock that can essentially tell you when your fermentation is started and ended. So we’re going to have Lee Bussy on the show, and we’re going to talk to him about brew bubbles. This week on homebrewing diy
And welcome back to home brewing DIY the podcast that takes on a do it yourself, aspect of home, brewing gadgets, contraptions, and parts. This podcast covers it all on this week’s show. We’re talking to Lee Bussy, he’s back on the show and we’re going to talk about his new project that he actually teased a year ago. When we talked about group high remix.
It’s cold brew bubbles. And it’s a do it yourself, open source electric air lock that you can make. And it’s a very, very simple and easy project. So we’re going to dive into that this week, but first I’d like to thank all of our patrons over a Patriot. And it’s because of you that this show can come to you week after week.
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A little update on what’s going on in my brewery. I brewed with my mash and boil system on. Sunday, and I brewed a pseudo October Fest. I’m pretty excited about this beer. I use the Oslo Yeast. And. I normally would have done this with a starter, just like when we were talking in our episode where we were talking about harvesting yeast, this was actually harvested.
Bike of the Oslo strain. And I just throw it in dry. I was like, Hey, I want to see if this works. And if it throws off any fruit flavors or anything like that. So I just did about a tablespoon right into the fermentor. Just as soon as I was done, I fermented in a keg this time. And it did take about a day to get going. I would say it took a little over 24 hours to get going.
And it was a 10 60 beer. I went to bed and it just started, I woke up the next day and it was already for med head down to 10. 19. And then by the end of today was already down at 10 16. So this thing is crazy. It’s, it’s definitely really, really fast yeast. And it’s now probably in the process of cleaning yourself up. So we’ll see, I probably get a cold crash this by Thursday and I brewed it on Sunday and.
Just crazy how fast could bike is so highly recommend given out the pseudo lager with A try. So we’ll, we’ll see how it tastes. Well, Let’s jump into this week’s episode. We’re going to talk to Lee Bussy and we’re going to talk to him about his new project brew bubbles.
. I’d like to welcome Lee Bussy to the show. He might remember he’s he’s in a previous episode where we talked about his current support for the project of group high remix. We have him back on the show. Cause in, in that previous episode, Lee had talked about a new project that he was working on and we would see it in the future.
And that project has since come out. He’s he’s now invented a open source project called brew bubbles. And uh, I’d like to welcome Lee to the show. Hi Haley. How are you?
Lee Bussy: Hey, I’m doing well. Thanks for having me again.
Colter Wilson: Oh, it’s always my pleasure. And welcome back to homebrewing. DIY. I’m pretty excited. You’re, you’re one of the, like, I think you’re the only, the second guest I’ve had back for a repeat episode. So I’m, I’m excited to have you back.
So basically you’re working on it pro project, , in general. And why don’t you just give me a bit of an idea of what the new project you have is called why don’t you give me an idea of what you’re trying to solve there.
Lee Bussy: You know, the very first thing, uh, that a new brewer says, if you’re on the home brew forums, you’ve seen it a million times. Uh, a Google search gave me 1.5 million results in less than a half a second. How long does it take for Homebrew to bubble? It’s a top search. It tells me it’s something that weighs heavily on new brewers.
It’s a very common question, as I said, but the common answers really suck. Uh, when I looked around and Homebrew talk, I got bubbles don’t mean anything. The classic relaxed, don’t worry. You have a home brew, just forget about it and it’ll happen. And these answers are really horrible. If you are the person that’s worrying about the first batch, the new brewer will typically get up an hour earlier than normal rush to the fermentor.
Uh, you know, there’s that inevitable stumbling around the garage and the underwear scene. I think I even took my first day of work off after I brewed a Homebrew just to sit there at home and wait for that bubble. I know others have done that. So there has to be a better answer then it doesn’t matter fact as it does.
Colter Wilson: I completely agree. I feel like, and even to this day, I’ve been brewing for a decade now. And even then if I brewed a batch and I, and you and I, we both have like tilt hydrometers. We could totally see when the fermentation starts. I still go out there and check and see how it’s doing with it. I look at the bubbles like that is something you look at.
Lee Bussy: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s the most entertaining part about it, except for, you know, watching your friends get a little bit lit after having drank MGD for their entire lives, but, you know,
Colter Wilson: Okay.
Lee Bussy: Yeast only does two things, even with the tilt, which is a fantastic product that takes a little bit of time before it starts fermenting that gravity starts coming down.
Yeast only does two things. It makes CO2 and alcohol. So that’s one of the things I wanted to be able to capture. Uh, I also wanted this to be, be a beginning brewer project, right. Something that was obtainable, something that wasn’t very lofty didn’t require having a CILA scopes and an engineering background.
That also meant that if the guy doesn’t keep brewing, you know, it’s, it’s not so painful to not have used that piece of technology. So. If this answers a question that a beginning brewer can have. Why not make it something that beginning brew gadgeteer can handle before they start collecting all of these other projects.
So approachable financially from a technology standpoint, but I wanted it to have something for advanced brewers too. For instance, wine makers who ferment in more ambient conditions can use this to track information about their brew. And that is. The ability to trend fermentation rate fermentation, temperature and chamber temperature. So we’re watching bubbles obviously, and there have been other attempts to do this spark fund, had something dating back to 2009. I believe it was a gentleman by the name of Paul ELAM was something in 2014. I believe it was an Instructables. And hacker, they had an article in 2015. All of those had the same thing in common rubber bands.
And I’m, I’m being serious about that. Hackaday one, the solution to mounting. This was rubber bands. So it wasn’t a particularly attractive solution. Then Plato comes along, right. These guys took that idea and took it to 11 on the dial. So very successful Kickstarter for them. Uh, and it was unique in that it created evenly spaced bubbles.
Uh, it was a very nice package. There’s four factor, but it still depends on someone else’s cloud. And the very important thing is if they released in 2017 and we have these other efforts dating back to 2009, it relied on prior art. So I I’m not. Really infringing upon anyone’s patent here. Plato has a great product, and if you want to buy something, I think you should buy that.
However, if you want to make something, this is a great way to do it. A gentleman by the name of on Homebrew, kind of got me thinking about this. He uses something very similar in an academic sort of a venue in 2005. But what separates this from the rest of these, uh, except for Plato, of course, is that this is fully baked.
If you follow these instructions, it’s a determination path. When you get to the end, you have something you can use it. Doesn’t leave off with the inevitable. And this was my idea. So I’d really like to see what you guys do with it. I want somebody to know what it’s going to look like when they’re done.
So none of the searching for cases, none of the searching for electronics boards and how do you Mount it or, or worse, um, you know, rubber bands and wires hanging off your fermenter. That’s not what I was looking for.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I think that’s a really great approach. I, uh, I love a lot of the. Existing projects that are out there in the open source world. But it seems to me, you thought this out into, uh, a process in a way that actually makes this a fully full baked project, right? From not just the software, not just the hardware, it’s kind of, Hey, these are simple components that you can get from anywhere.
You can make this, this project. But the idea is that anybody it’s approachable and approachable in a way that you, you don’t have a lot of people, scouring forums for information, that’s not there. Right.
Lee Bussy: Absolutely right. It has to be easy. It has to be something that you can see the beginning, the middle and the end before you start, because we want to know what it looks like. We’re brewing beer. We know what fear turns out like, but we don’t know what this electronic project turns out to be. So if I can’t show a picture of it working.
Then how can that person who is new to be, or new to electronics now envision how that’s going to work for him or her,
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I love the approach. What are some of the underlying technologies behind the brew bubbles project?
Lee Bussy: you know, like a lot of projects that we have now, and not just in homebrewing, but, uh, you know, it’s, uh, indigenous, I suppose, to the. The controller subculture is this ESP 82 66 controller. Uh, it’s on a dev board just to say that it is very easy to work with. It has connections that are easy to solder and it’s built around this.
We most D one mini board, very common form factor. It’s. The size of a large postage stamp. It’s very inexpensive. And since we’re counting bubbles, we need a way to count them. So we use a photo interrupter. Again, it’s not something that is incredibly innovative. Drop counters are widely used in chemistry and manufacturing count parts.
We’ll throw in a couple DSA team, one wire sensors, which is a mouthful, but it’s really just a very inexpensive temperature sensor that comes in an easy to use form factor. It’s already got its leads on there. So you can disconnect the wires to your board. Um, and I, and a handful of what’s called passives, which are just capacitors and resistors.
Three of each, I believe very simple. There’s a webpage. It’s responsive on mobile. There’s no app needed. You don’t have to trust me to install side loaded applications on your phone and break your warranty or anything like that. Uh, and most importantly, it doesn’t run on someone else’s cloud and that’s really the problem with some of these Homebrew related projects out there.
Great ideas, great execution in a lot of cases, but if it doesn’t take off the person who’s footing the bill for that cloud presence is just going to stop paying for it and it goes away. So you have an app that no longer works and your, your data is gone.
Colter Wilson: Couldn’t agree more with that particular sentiment. And, and, and I. Well, always when we’re having this conversation about the cloud connectivity, I, I like it when they have connectivity to the cloud, but I don’t like it when they rely on the cloud to actually function. Right. And I, and I always bring back the old brew bug, which was a really cool product and a very expensive product.
It was a, it was, I believe around $250 for the brew bug product. And people footed that bill, they pushed hard and marketed it really hard. Then one day they went out of business and every single brew bug that was in the wild, all of a sudden became a brute don’t they just didn’t work, a brew brick.
Exactly. And, and because it relied so heavily on that cloud, it just didn’t have the ability to work. And so, and when we look at other products like the tilt hydrometer, I’ll use as a great example, It’s a piece of hardware you buy and it’s not, it, it too is not inexpensive. They’re $135 a piece. But on the other hand of that, you, the, the data that streams from it can be put up any cloud device you want.
And so that to me is what really makes it such a great approach to a product, right.
Lee Bussy: Right. And that does set the bar for a fully packaged and usable system. Uh, you know, Noah really thought about a lot going into this thing and they really did an excellent idea. So when I think of project, I, I look at it and actually I look at it three feet away from me because it’s sitting right next to me.
That’s a, it’s a great project. So. Well, you know, so this last thing about this technology, I guess is why, why bubbles? Right? Because back to the, they don’t matter, relax, don’t worry. Have a home brew. The thing is bubbles do mean fermentation. I take a lot of heat for this and actually on one of the forums, when I released these guys just open both barrels of the flame thrower on me, thinking I was trying to sell a commercial product.
I’ve not. So if bubbles didn’t matter, then Plato wouldn’t work. Plato obviously works. If you take the example of a, just a standard American ale, uh, 10 50 original gravity, 10, 12 final gravity comes in at about 5% alcohol. By the time you’re done in your five gallon batch, you got 960 grams of ethanol. One mole of CO2 creates one mole of ethanol.
So you don’t have to even know what a mole is. You just have to know that there is a correlation there one-to-one between ethanol and CO2. If you want to do the math and nobody does, but I did, there are about 275,000 standards, airlock bubbles during that fermentation period. And if that’s true, we can count them.
And if we can count them, we can do something with it. Now I’m not same brew. Bubbles is on par with Plato where, you know, you can trend the gravity of your through as it goes through fermentation. It’s possible to do that. Plato guys also solved for making very uniformed bubbles. So if a person wants to extend this project, it’s there.
I’d like to see somebody take it. But right now that all this does is it gives you a relative approach to the bubbles being produced. And I’ve seen some great graphs guys on Homebrew talk have posted there’s from brew father, which was very gracious and worked with me to develop support. For his friend, also a graphing capabilities there.
So it does create very usable data.
Colter Wilson: Even an estimation is better than nothing. Right. And so the idea for me, and I’ll give you a great example. One of the big questions people are always trying to solve for is, Hey, is my beer finished? Can I package it right? And the way you did it before was like, Hey, I think it’s done. I’ll give it a few more days.
And having some sort of data, even if it’s an estimation is better than just wait. Right. At least that’s the way I look at it. And, and a great example, going back to products such as tilts in the Plato, because they have graphing that can kind of tell you where, where your beer is, and if it’s close to being finished, it just allows you to kind of understand the trends of where a beer, where, where a beer is in its fermentation process, and whether it is really done or not.
And I think that that that’s really what people want to know. Right. Wouldn’t you agree?
Lee Bussy: Oh, exactly. Yep. Folks, whether they believe it or not are really good at things like calculus. Uh, and my father would laugh. He’s laughing somewhere in heaven right now for me saying that. But if you look at a graph, you can kind of extrapolate where it is a graph is going. Assuming it’s a smooth enough graph to look at.
So, if you have your data, you can look at it and make a really reasonable assumption where you are on your fermentation curve, just based on the relative frequency of bubbles. And as I look at these user submitted graphs, I see that repeated in their work as well. So even if you don’t think, you know, calculus, you’ve got an incredible set of intelligence clicking away in the back of your head that can interpret something visual like that.
And be able to derive very good information from it.
Colter Wilson: I think that’s a way better way of explaining it than the long winded way I just tried to. So, yes.
Lee Bussy: Well, somebody’s eyes glazed over when I said calculus. So hopefully they made it through that.
Colter Wilson: But, but it’s completely, really true. I think that when you have the data in front of you and you can discern something from it and it’s in the form of a graph, it helps you make better choices and decisions. Uh, I, I think that one of the big problems that people have, especially when you’re a new home brewer is you’re impatient.
You want this thing to work and you want to baby it. And as you become more experienced, you kind of just let things ride and you kind of get used to how the process, just let the process happen. But when you’re a new brewer specifically, you want to baby the thing and having some data behind it and having a chart is going to really help you make just better choices and less likely to screw up your beer.
You at least that’s the way I look.
Lee Bussy: Yep. Absolutely. And I got an email from a person doesn’t have to be just beer. For instance, I built this around counting bubbles, but I had a chat with a gentleman who is using this to track his. This is going to sound horrible. So I’ll explain it quickly. Afterwards, salami chamber, he built a chamber in which he hangs salami and it has secure for a period of time.
So he wanted to trend the temperature of that chamber. So completely passive. It’s just watching, but he’s able to pick up his phone in the middle of the night and take a look at it. Yes. My salami chamber is fine. I’m not going to make any of the jokes that are coming to mind. Yeah. So.
Colter Wilson: is like, but like, even then you look at like charcuterie cheese, you look at, uh, you look at things like making yogurt, all of these things that are, do have these biological processes that are happening, having data to know what’s going on in something that you kind of just done by.
You know, Hey, this is the way it goes. And I just have to trust the process. It’s nice to have some sort of underlying to help you make choices.
Lee Bussy: Exactly. And in the case of wine makers, where they’re more about their ambient conditions, a terroir, if you will, for the fermentation, they can look back and see what happened during the fermentation. So I’ve got a great wine here. How would I do this again?
Colter Wilson: Exactly. And, and I can also look at when you have these certain charts. Here’s the one thing that I’ve correlated after using. A device that’s giving me really good data on fermentation is you start to see the curve of yeast. Like a specific strain of yeast is going to have a different curve than a different strain of yeast it, and I’ll, you let’s go with some dry strains, right?
Like a tends to start fermentation and then just like the crash after two days. And it’s like, just choose through sugar really, really fast. Whereas an. Is going to have a much, a steeper slope in, in the, in the data stream. Right. And so, I mean a much more gradual slope in the data stream, it’s weird.
Then you throw a lager yeast in there and that even becomes a much more gradual slope. The idea is that each individual yeast kind of has it’s own chart if that makes any sense. Yeah. And you can almost look at the type of yeast. And look at the chart and depending on the beard, it was always the same.
It’s kind of crazy when you think about it that way.
Lee Bussy: It is. And you know, that data is important. And as you’re pointing out, you’re watching the chart that the information you see right now, it’s really only important when it’s next to the information you got before. So a doctor that I work with explain this wants to be in it’s it’s a terribly disgusting analogy, but he says, look at your poop.
If you look at it once it’s poop, if you look at it every time, you know, if something’s going on in your body, that’s different. So that’s going to stick with everybody now, cause it stuck with me. But the same way with your yeast, you know, if you saw the fermentation in the days past, and you can see today where it is and know what your beer is doing and where your beer is and its life cycle.
Colter Wilson: Exactly. Uh, what, what, how does brew bubbles think? , I guess the better way to say is how, how does the software actually think and determine, like, how does it count?
Lee Bussy: Yeah. That’s, that’s a great question. I mean, brew bubbles, does it takes care of three questions, I guess. So when I sat down to design this that’s really the three things I typed into my development environment were, were the comments, uh, what’s the temperature because it does trend to temperatures. Did I see a bubble?
Did a bubble pass in front of this photo receptor, and then does anyone care? So what’s, the temperature is easy. I’ve got two temperature sensors and I’m polling these every couple of seconds. And then, because we like to see nice, pretty data. We smooth it out. We average that over about a minute, and then I just keep that internally, the bubbles, same thing.
Uh, if you sit and watch your airlock and everyone does. You know that there is sort of a cycle there. Sometimes if I ferment with one of my plastic fermenters, for instance, they kind of breathe, you know, I think they almost expand and then exhale. So they get that rhythmic blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
A glass fermenter is very smooth, but I’m doing the same thing with the bubbles. I’m smoothing them out and I take a bubbles per minute reading doing just really simple math in there. And then comes the part. Does anyone care? Every so often a timer clicks off in the software and says, Hey, did this person who built, grew bubbles?
Tell me to send the data anywhere. If yes, send it webpage sits there at the other part, you don’t need to send it anywhere. And it just updates every minute it goes and pulls that data and just takes and presents it for the user temperature. Fermentation temperature bubbles per minute. That’s it, it answers very simple questions, three of them in this case,
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. And you gave me a list of all the parts. And let’s say I went and sourced all those parts. How long does it take to build one? What’s the, what’s the, what’s the timeline? Is it something I could do in a couple hours with what does that look like?
Lee Bussy: you know? So there’s two different ways to go back, getting the parts. Of course, there. Is a, a, I call them two different kinds of shoppers Ali express shopper, who takes about two months, three months sometimes to collect things because they’re going to get them as cheaply as possible. And that in itself is an interesting hunt.
And then there is the Amazon prime shopper and maybe you’ll get some money for me saying Amazon prime, but there’s Amazon prime shoppers that want it right now. So on the low end of the scale, I’ve been able to put the parts for this together is for about $6. Actually, each if you’re making three or four at a time, that assembly is about a three on a 10 scale.
So if you you’re as old as I am, you might have, I bought a crystal radio kit at radio shack and you and your father may have sat down and put that thing together in about 10 minutes, which is the attention span of a kid. Let’s face it. So the time it takes is a ten-year-olds attention span. So if you know nothing about it, uh, and you’re got the webpages open and you’re looking at the pictures and things like that, because I tried to present enough information that a person new to a soldering iron could do this thing.
I really think that a person who knew his way around wire Clippers could do it in less than 20 minutes. It takes me less than five minutes to put one together now at the most personal be up and running within an hour. And I think that’s a real low investment for the return.
Colter Wilson: Are there any special tools that are needed? Like you mentioned a soldering iron, are there any other special tools you need?
Lee Bussy: Yeah, good question. If you’re going to do this, I think a soldering iron is definitely a good one is definitely a must. You can buy one again. Ali express shoppers can do a soldering iron for about five bucks. You will enjoy a good soldering iron better. So if you have one great, if you don’t have one, get a cheap one.
See if you even like doing electronics projects. So there’s that you’ll need some small diagonal cutters to trim the leads. Um, and these things are optional, but as I said, I wanted to present the entire thing, you know, what does it look like when it’s done? So I do provide a three D model intended to be printed on a three D printer.
So if you have a three D printer, great. If you don’t have one. I would suggest posting on Homebrew, talk in the thread and see if there’s somebody there who might want to make you one, I’d be perfectly fine with sending, you know, a couple of parts out for people, whatever. There’s always an option for three D printer.
You can pay for it to be done for at the extreme low end of the spectrum. There are those heaven forbid rubber bands. You really can just connect this to your airlock with a rubber band. And the last tool that I really like, and I use a lot of in all my projects is a DuPont crimper. And this is the little 2.5, four millimeter pitch pins and holes.
If you look at an Arduino, for instance, um, that’s the pitch of the holes along the headers, being able to crimp those things makes it a lot easier. You do not need to do that though. Uh, putting the pins on there is great. If you want to be able to disconnect the sensors, but you can solder the leads from the temperature sensors directly to the boards.
That’s like I say, completely optional and that’s it. And a magnifying glass. If you have my eyes.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, but that when it comes to those tools, they’re, they’re very easily easy to find and inexpensive. Uh, I personally have a really, really nice, I have a really nice soldering iron with the heat gun and the whole deal. All digital. And even then, and I think that that was pretty expensive. It was $35. It wasn’t very expensive.
So it’s something where they’re in comparison to having to buy power tools or anything like that. This is very, very inexpensive set of tools, right?
Lee Bussy: Absolutely. And the first time you use a good one where you just tell it what temperature you want, and it only takes 30 seconds to heat up. You, you hear that choir of angels and you show your show, your spouse who couldn’t care less, but you just want to extol the virtues of good tools and, uh,
Colter Wilson: who couldn’t care less of my projects is the story of my life.
Lee Bussy: But you know, by once cry, once if you get good tools, you’re always going to be able to find a use for them.
Colter Wilson: Exactly. And then one thing I, you, you also mentioned is a brew father and Brewer’s friend. Are there any types of like, what, what projects does this. Like, like software projects or cloud services. Does this project integrate with.
Lee Bussy: Well, it’s intended to be very generic. So of course, maintaining group high Rumix I’ve got that sitting next to me. So that was the very first thing I sent to. From Interac. I spoke to John, actually, I need them needled him a little bit earlier this morning about, Hey, when are you going to get this done?
But he swears he’s going to get it done. So for men track. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he’ll have that done by the end of his vacation brewers friend, Peru father. Um, and because it’s Stan, it sends a standard Jason payload, which is just data with braces around it. You can send to any number of cloud providers. So, you know, there are all kinds of places out there too, which you can send your information.
Um, I haven’t even heard of some of them, uh, Google sheets or, or anything. You know, anything you can dream of, you can send it into your home automation and ask your home automation. I’m not going to say the word cause she’s sitting right next to me. It’ll make a noise when I say her name, but, you know, so, and so what is my fermentation rate?
It tells me backed by fermentation, right? If you can dream it, you can do it.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, that’s the cool thing about the dot Jason payload is, is that it’s just so easy use with so many different, it’s such an easy data stream to pick up on other cloud services. A lot of people, like, for example, use things like IBA dots and they’ll use a, I liked Google sheets a lot because Google sheets is easy to write, get the data into, and it makes sure it’s real easy.
If you’re looking for a really low effort solution and not having to buy any piece of software, Google sheets is always a great option. So yeah.
Lee Bussy: And I’ve got it dumping into just, you know, I can read it using post post-match. That’s what it’s called. It’s so open source software where even my windows laptop can receive the Jason and save it off. And, you know, a person who is reasonably proficient in Excel can, you know, store the data there so you can do it all locally.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, it’s pretty, it’s pretty cool. When you think of it in putting it into whatever. And that’s why I like that. It’s not touched to any one cloud provider. Right? You don’t have to worry about that person building you out an API for stuff, somebody to tap into. It’s just kind of just spent, sends the data where you want it to go.
It’s it’s super cool. When you think of it that way.
Lee Bussy: Yeah, that’s the thing I’ve always tried to stay away from on these projects. I don’t want any sort of hint that I’m trying to make money off of it because you instantly, first of all, you turn some people off and I get that and that’s not to say that I’m not fully behind people who make money out of things.
That’s great. I’m glad for that, because those are the ones that can really afford to innovate. And you, you, you receive a benefit from that innovation. But I don’t want to feel obliged. Right? If I am done developing brew bubbles, I can set it down and walk away. And that sort of ecosystem continues to work.
I don’t have to maintain a server for people and I’m not responsible for their data.
Colter Wilson: Well, then if you also decided to go. The other way somebody can pick up the project and keep going with it, right? If it’s somebody real use in it, this is the cool thing with open source. I like to use raspberry pints as an example, that was a open source kind of beer display board that could integrate with sensors to kind of tell you how much beer was left in your keg.
And the guy who actually started that project, you know, he got busy, couldn’t stay with it. And the entire community rallied around it and has continued to maintain it, updating the software, to be able to do things like different versions of the raspberry PI is, is it’s it’s it’s updated. Yeah. And the idea is that even if you decide to drop it with an open source project, if the community really, really likes the project, they can pick it up and start adding to the project as the, as needed.
That’s one of my favorite parts about open.
Lee Bussy: Yep. Well, that’s, that’s obviously how we met right with the brew pot, remix, love brew pie, and wanted to keep it going. So that’s how it got there. So brew bubbles is released under the MIT license, which is an exceedingly permissive license. You can take it, you can package it and you can sell it. If you want to be a brew bubble seller or call it something else, you can do all that under the MIT license.
The only thing is you must also release the software. So the most permissive license out there.
Colter Wilson: which is totally fine, right. It. W I, I, I love licenses like that. The other part is like, for example, a brew pie, you’ve done the group high remix to kind of keep the old Arduino brew pie alive. My neighbor across the street, just built a brew block system, which is. Which is current iteration of group high software, and he’s brewing batches of beer with it.
It’s, it’s turned out to be a really great piece of software as well. And, but it’s all still kind of based on that original technology, even though it’s kind of gone in many different directions and it’s just so cool to see all of that.
Lee Bussy: Well, th the DNA of the founder is in it, right? So if you look at, look at brew pie, it’s got a way to do things, and that’s always been part of, you know, the way Elko thing. So it makes sense that that’s going to come out that way.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And it’s funny is that, uh, my neighbor who has his brew block system, he’s like, man, this thing ferments, like so perfectly, I’m like, yeah, that’s the brew pie in its DNA.
Lee Bussy: Yeah, I can do that with this $4.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, but you know, he’s also mashing with it and doing the whole thing. So it’s, it was quite the project. I think he’s, he’s now a couple thousand dollars into his brew system, all running on brew block. So kind of cool.
Lee Bussy: Well, we all in one way or another, we all owe a lot to Elko and releasing that as an open source project, because it really set the standard for the rest of them.
Colter Wilson: it really did. And it’s a set the standard to where you have. I think about how many spinoff projects that has you have brew pie, remix, you have ferment track, you have group pilots, uh, and, and a whole string of other different PID controllers that are all pretty much based off of that same idea. Right.
And it’s, it’s kinda crazy. Uh, what, speaking of projects are you, you got any other projects in the works or are you still, are, are you mainly focused on group high remix and brew bubbles?
Lee Bussy: I do. Yeah. I mean, last year, maybe around this time, I tickled the brew bubbles a little bit and I appreciate the opportunity to do that. So yeah, there is a new project, um, and it’s tough to say anything about it and not give it completely away, but it is beer related. I’ll give you that. Um, and you know, I’ve joined forces.
I mentioned John Beeler and from Interac have joined forces with him on this project. And it combines really the two most important things from he and I. He says, if you get confused, it’s a bug. And I embraced that whole heartedly. It’s gotta be easy to use because I’ve talked to plumbers on, you know, working with a brew related project and those guys have to get it as much as the guy who has a PhD in computer science.
Um, electronics and programming should not be a prerequisite to entering into this project. Then the second thing is, and I mentioned this a few times if after you finished the instructions, if you get to the last page and you have followed diligently, that, which we’ve set out for you, if you don’t have a finished product, it’s not a product, so it’s gotta be easy and it’s gotta be done.
It’s also going to be something that’s modular. So your setup may not be the same as my setup. And I want to allow now a spectrum of choices. We’ve talked about equipment choice, physical, physical constraints, and ability levels, and feature needs and wants. So this brewing related project, and I’ve really said nothing about it, but I’m saying a lot.
Um, I think it’s going to have a very wide appeal and I think the concept, and it’s not brew blocks. So I’ll just cross that one off the list, but just think of that same kind of concept, right? Where you take Legos and put them together the way you want. It’s going to be able to put things together in ways that maybe John or I didn’t even dream of, and hopefully next year around this time, maybe we’ll be talking about that.
Colter Wilson: I I’m, I’m super excited to, I feel like, uh, it, we’re kind of in a, in a cool Renaissance in the whole brewing world where we’re in it kind of weird how I, I started a podcast based on this is that there is a lot of amazing electronic. Gadgets and yeah. And different types of softwares out there that can really just help with the brewing process that were inaccessible to everyone a decade ago.
Right. And so it’s kind of amazing to see, and it’s, it’s the advent of things like VSP 82, 66 microcontroller, uh, Arduinos, uh, these types of very inexpensive. Uh, computing boards that can run pretty complex programs, but do so in a very inexpensive way. It’s, it’s really cool to see what people are building out of stuff.
Lee Bussy: It is. I have a whole box of controllers sitting next to me, but do you know, there’s a common theme there. You got the Arduino ESPN two 66 and the ESP 32. And in that you can pull just about anything off.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And, and w you know, if you look at it, here’s the way I always explain to it. The Arduino UNO is think of it is like a serial connection to a microcontroller, right? Uh, the ESP 82 66, they’re like, Hey, we’ve now got some wifi capability instead of having to be a serial connection, yet you still can run similar programs probably actually has a little bit more memory than there, you know, as well.
And
Lee Bussy: Oh, it has a ton more. Yeah.
Colter Wilson: And then you go into the SP 32, which now allows you to have Bluetooth and wifi. And then, and then you get into spark boards that have cell phone connections. Right. It’s kind of crazy. When you think about like being able to pair it up and get to the internet in all these different ways, using these different boards
Lee Bussy: But still, I’ve got a, an UNO sitting next to me. So they’re not going to go anytime soon, but I’ve got to say after doing remix, where to add a feature. When I added the ITC LCDs, I had to search through the code and delete 27 letters. I’m talking letters like ABCD, EFG. I had to find 27 letters to delete from the code in order to be able to fit everything in that’s how tightly packed that is.
So.
Colter Wilson: I think that was actually the big reason why Elko moved to the, he moved to the spark was because he was like, Hey, I can’t, I don’t want to optimize this anymore for such a small payload. Right.
Lee Bussy: No, I completely understand it.
Colter Wilson: But you know, the thing about an Arduino is the thing is solid. They just work and I’ve. I had, I’ve not had an Arduino ever go bad on me luckily, but you know, the idea is that they they’re just solid and they work and they work well.
Lee Bussy: They are, I’ve let the magic smoke out of a couple of them, but if I leave them alone, they work pretty well.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, exactly. There’s that plan. If you mess with it, you’ve done it. But if it just sits there and runs its program, they work really, really well. Uh, what, you know, if we were to want to find out more information about brew pie, remix and brew bubbles were, where would we find that kind of information?
Lee Bussy: Well, I’ve tried to make that as easy as possible. A brew bubbles is on gribbles.com and you can even find the thread for brew bubbles on Homebrew talk at support dot brew, bubbles.com or. Docks Doug rebuilt that brew bubbles.com along the same lines, brew pie, remix.com support docs. Same way. Try to make it easy for everyone.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. And I’ll put links to all of that in the show notes. If you’re listening to this podcast, just scroll to the bottom of whatever bass player and there’ll be links to all of this information, to do a deeper dive into some of these really cool projects. Lee, I want to, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast yet.
Again, it’s always great to talk to you and your son, a wealth of knowledge when it comes to these technologies. That just, it really is awesome when we can have you on the show.
Lee Bussy: I appreciate it. Coulter, appreciate you having me back. And you know, I, I said it last time. I think I stand on the shoulders of giants, so I really appreciate everyone that was out there forging the way for us.
Colter Wilson: Exactly. Well, uh, I guess we’ll talk to you in a year when you’re get your new project out.
Lee Bussy: I’ll put it on the calendar.
Colter Wilson: Awesome. Well, thanks, Lee.
Lee Bussy: Thank you.
Colter Wilson: I’d like to thank Lee for taking the time to come on this week’s show as always Lee is super detailed and he’s a very good explainer of these types of projects in the audio format. I always love having an on the show. That being said, after our interview, I chatted with Lee a bit and he is sending me over some development boards for a
Remix and for a brew bubble system. So keep an eye on my social media and I’ll be posting pictures of those builds. That’s. Homebrewing DIY all one word I’m on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Other than that, that’s it for this week. And we’ll be out next week. On homebrewing, DIY.
I have an Instagram account?!
I looks like Marie tracked one down for you. Haha I received the link