Welcome to Season two I have a bit a change to formate in that I changed the music and the announcements will now come at the end so we can jump into the interview ASAP.
This week we talk to Lee Bussy and John Beeler about thier newest project Keg Cop.
We talk about a charity that Lee is working with here is the info: https://www.hivesforheroes.com/
Music: Jeff II – Bring The Party Back Link to the song: https://youtu.be/QUaHEA4sZUs
Show Transcript
(AI Driven and will have errors)
Colter Wilson: Oh man. I’m liking this new sound.
Welcome to season two, a home brewing DIY. The show that takes on the, do it yourself, aspect of home, brewing gadgets, contraptions, and parts. The show covers it all. On this week’s show, we’re talking to Lee Bussey and John Buehler of keg cop. Their newest project. They’ve been on the show before.
I think cited to have them. But. We’re going to get them on the show and we’re going to listen to the interview. But first a word from our sponsor.
. I’d like to welcome Lee Bussy and John Beeler to the show. You might have heard previous episodes with both of them separately. John Beeler’s the writer of ferment. And various other projects like tilt bridge. I think that’s another cool little project he’s done. You might know Lee bossy. He’s done a couple shows with us where he’s talked about brew bubbles, and he also is maintaining the current art Reno version of brew pie, meat remix. And I now have them both on the show because these guys are good friends. And we’re going to talk about a new project that they’ve worked on together. And we’re going to talk about keg cops. So I’d love to, let’s start with, maybe let’s actually not talk about that. Let’s talk about what you guys have been brewing.
. Lee, what have you been brewing lately?
Lee Bussy: Oh, wow. It starts with me. All right. So most recently I did a batch of Skeeter P that’s a summertime classic for us. We just had a group picnic and It’s about 50, 50, 50% of the people have had it before. And they know that when they’re in a 95 to a hundred degree weather, not to drink it as if they’re thirsty.
And then they in turn get to enjoy watching the other half who are not quite so well versed in the ways of Skeeter P they turn into a thing called a rock lobster. They start listening to music, pounded down, Skeeter P and before long, they pass out in an awkward position on the lawn somewhere men often they turn bright red pretty enjoyable.
And we like doing that every year to the new folks.
Colter Wilson: I gotta admit that can, will and has happened to me. So I will.
Lee Bussy: than that, a few wines and some maids, but I haven’t done any beer. I’m waiting for a little bit cooler, right?
Colter Wilson: One thing, if you are interested in a Lee’s Skeeter pea recipe, we actually have it on home brewery, diy.com. If you go back and check the show notes from our original show with Lee, where we talked about brew pie remix, he actually gave me that recipe and you could download it and beer XML. So if you want to make a bunch of rock lobsters yourself, you can do. On our website and then we’re gonna,
Lee Bussy: To be fair. That’s my version of it. So the original Skeeter p.com is out there. And that’s where I got the idea for it.
Colter Wilson: yeah. Skeeter p.com is a thing as well. And skier P is like a, it’s like a lemony kind of fermented beverage and it does taste good and it’s easy drinking, but it’s a little high octane it’s good stuff. And then we got, and then we got John peeler on the show. And what have you been brewing lately?
John Beeler: So I it’s interesting during the pandemic we’ve actually so normally I, I live in New York city and we’ve actually. Quite a bit of time in Virginia and there’s a brewery That’s down here blue mountain brewery. They have a classic lager. It’s a pre-prohibition lager. It’s absolutely delicious. The guy who runs the brewery is fantastic. Sent him an email, just said, Hey, listen, I’m a home brewer. I’d really like to brew this. But I live in it and really liked to drink it. But I live in New York. You guys don’t distribute in New York. Can I have the recipe? And he was incredibly kind provided the recipe. Last week ordered all the materials for it. Sat down, got like we were back in New York for a week decided, okay, I’m going to go ahead and brew them. And midway through the brew right before the boil, the heater on my all-in-one brewing appliance crapped out. And so all of a sudden I ended up where I am stuck with five gallons of pre boiled work with nothing that I can do with it.
So I’m in the market for a new one of those. Once I get it, I’m going to try and and brew that recipe again. And then I’ll have a nice lager here later in the late, later in the year. So we’ll see.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I’m actually just finishing a pseudo lager that I made earlier this year. Yeah. Family. I actually have a commercial keg on tap, which I never have. So I, in my kegerator, I have a ball lock kig I have a pin lock cake and I have a Sankey cake all going at the same time at a one system.
So a funny
little thing.
Lee Bussy: Dogs and cats living together.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. It is like dogs and cats living together, so I look, let’s talk about kid cop. I, this is your guys’ new project. This is a tandem project. So we’ve split it up in two ways. What let’s talk, let’s start there. Let’s talk about how you guys divided and conquered to come up with this new cool serving software.
Lee Bussy: Sure. We we started talking about different ways to take over the world. And we decided that was our too much work. Rather than do that, we decided we take over a little corner of the Homebrew community. And there’s. Products out there that do some really awesome things and part of what makes this source so great is that, you’ll do something and then somebody else will pick up the ball and run even further.
And it’s this self-licking ice cream cone. It keeps going. As we’ve got respiratory pints out there and part of raspberry pints is that Arduino that sits there and counts. One of the things that I like to do I like to make sure that things can be leveraged in a few different ways. So avoiding the unit Tasker, I want to make sure that the reporting that it does can go to multiple platforms, which is part of where John comes in.
And then it’ll also perform more than one function. So we’ve got this incredibly capable processor, right? Let’s have it do a few other things so we can report to two or three or four different platforms. We can control the temperature. We can report on the temperature and we can even provide a little bit of a rudimentary display for somebody who does not want the major tap list.
So have taken it a bit further. And made sure that we could use a communication method other than a USB cable, because we have wifi and most of these controllers allow some agnostic platform use and create a start to finish solution that just about anybody can follow. A lot of these projects start out with, Hey, I did this and they show you a picture of a bailing wire and bubblegum project.
And they infer that you too can do this.
Colter Wilson: Okay.
Lee Bussy: I don’t have that bailing wire and I don’t have that bubble gum. So the end goal is it is a part of a system of systems that anybody can build and could be a fully functioning, self sustaining, self, boxed up project to, to be able to turn on and amaze your friends.
John Beeler: Yeah. And
I think that’s probably one of the neatest things about keg cop is the fact that unlike some of the other systems that are out there, it is designed to be both. Own a product on its own, as well as part of an integrated system. So it’s the kind of thing where you can get all the functionality out of the box.
You can build it, you can run it, you can track your kegs and see what’s going on with them. And then once you’re ready to move on to something that’s bigger or, plug that data into something else you have the capability of doing so. So it’s just, it is really good at that. Having that expandability and being something that isn’t just a single part that stands on its own.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And just to clarify, like cake cop is a kind of all in one kind of keg management system, you’re going to have, you’re going to be able to have a digital list if you want. You also contract like the poor levels of your kegs through K-cup as well. So for example, you start with five gallon keg and I pour a few pints off it’s.
I can go to K cop and it’s going to tell me how many. How many, how much beer I have left. So it’s going to have some sort of information to tell me that. So very similar to the old school raspberry pints project, which I will admit that the raspberry PI project and raspberry pints project. And I’ve actually had feedback from the guy who originally wrote raspberry pints randomly.
He sent me an email one day and he obviously hasn’t touched that project in years and he even admitted as much. So it’s one of those projects that like, yeah, the guy who originally did it abandoned it. And a few people have tried to pick up. I know Lee’s pretty active in, in some of those forums and as well as you John, but in the end, it never really got the upgrades.
It needed. To me, I, even to this day, I know that there are definitely workarounds, but, it’s a system that worked better on wheezy than anything else. And there are multiple versions of the raspberry PI software since. Let’s talk about if we look at the old raspberry pints version and you talked about a few things there, where you said, Hey, Raspberry pints did this and we allow this to, not just have a USB cable, it’s got the ability to do multiple things.
It can be part of a platform. It can be a standalone system, but when it comes down to it, what would you say is like the biggest differentiator between that older version of this kind of case management system and this newer version and a newer approach to.
Lee Bussy: Biggest differentiator, is that and by the way, keg cop does support respray pints.
So if somebody has that investment, it will absolutely report up to there. But I think the biggest probably the two biggest differentiators are that there is no operating system, at least not that’s accessible to the end user.
When they patch their respiratory pie or when the SD card finally goes bad and they replace it, they’re not left with. Yeah, 10 year old software that will no longer run on a contemporary operating system. This is a microcontroller that has embedded code and it’s intended to just work. So in the same way that in the brew pie or ferment track world, where you have that controller, it’s that sacrosanct box in the corner that will run no matter what, this will continue to run and be function.
Somewhat. We keep on teasing the somewhat part. But yes, it does track your beers. It tells you’ve got eight or nine things on tap. It tells you that your keg is 50% tapped that you have so many ounces left. And it provides a real nice interface for the user to be able to wet their whistle a little bit, just to get into that world of they’re coming in cold.
Now I’ve built this controller. Now I have a functioning, I’m going to call it a pseudo tap list because it’s nowhere near as pretty as some of the other offerings out there. But it is a, a screen with a bar going across. It’s a reasonable facsimile of the color of beer and, right away by looking at it, how much beer you have left that.
No chords, we cut the chords. Of course, we still have a power cord, you don’t have to have that respray PI hanging off the back of your your kegerator anymore.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And so is this using, underlying technology-wise this using Arduinos? Is this using ESP 82, 66? What does that micro control?
Lee Bussy: It uses the ESP 32, which is the the new comer, in that world, or at least in the expressive world. No matter what, I think that ESPN to 2 66 is probably not going away. Loland is the company that puts it out and they would probably like for it to go away, but it’s not going to so many people have it embedded in their systems, but it is quite a bit more capable.
It’s got more memory. It’s got a dual processor. It’s got wifi on board as does the 82 66. It also has onboard Bluetooth, which I’m not using in this project. John leveraged it in his tilt bridge project. So it’s a very common platform it’s available everywhere. I checked earlier and it’s $6 and 50 cents before shipping from Ali express, which is where Loland has their store.
That is their storefront compared to an Arduino. Now, if you buy a real Arduino UNO right now, it’s $23. $11, $12 for a clone from Amazon. So this is a much more capable system. Again, with that embedded wifi at a lower price point to start with.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And in that, that obviously yeah. Improve. It could move into Bluetooth and using that functionality as well. It’s I don’t know. The ESP 32 is such a capable controller and the cool thing with microcontrollers. This is my favorite thing with them. Is the rock solid. Unlike when you talk about like for example, A lot of people tried to take brew pie, or even for men track.
I don’t think they ever did, but they tried to take it and have it just hosted a hundred percent on the raspberry PI. And I can’t tell you how many SD cards have gone bad for me over the years. It’s just the SD card technology is just touchy like that. And so for me, it’s something where I’ve never had an Arduino go bad.
I’ve never had an ESP 82, 66 go bad. I’ve had them when I’ve tried to program them, they were already. If you’ve got really cheap Chinese ones, but I’ve never had one go bad if it was a working model and they’re just rock solid because they just run their thing and that’s all they do. They don’t have hard, they don’t have an operating system to fail.
They don’t have any other memory other than the solid state memory they come with. And they’re just really really reliable. How does kickoff think w like in the brains how does it actually like process. The information of how does it feel?
Lee Bussy: Nope. Ultimately, there was a very good model out there in respirate pints. You are counting pulses. So the flow meter. All they do is they trigger on or off as a wheel, or if some of them are infrared sensors, but they count pulses 20,000, I think per gallon for the top of the line Swiss flow and maybe a couple of thousand for the less top of the line ones that you get directly from Ali express, when you’re ordering your controller.
So the better ones will have a finer granularity, much more precise, but they’re just counting bits. It’s just like flipping a switch off. And as a matter of fact, what I was when I was developing this, I did a demo board just to have some rudimentary functionality that I could trigger from my recliner.
And there it is right there. Yeah. Trigger from my recliner and not have to walk out to the kegerator. And it was just a push button that I would hit a bunch of times like a Telegraph. So it counts pulses. It does math. It says, you’ve pulsed this many times you have poured this much beer. It’s actually very basic displays the remaining.
And then it allows you to do some other things that you don’t have to do. Thankfully very often, do the calibration and we’ve tried to make that simpler. Often questions about people, Hey, I poured this much beer and it says that my cake is half empty, but I poured 12 ounces. Then you have to walk somebody through how to calibrate for their particular flow meter.
And if you have to say it more than three or four times, you probably could have programmed it by that time. So another portion of keg cop allows you to say, all right, for beer now for your beer, hopefully you follow that direction. If you can’t follow that direction, by the way, this is probably the wrong project.
You tell it when you tell it, when you’re done pouring your beer, and then it tells you to weigh it. And if you’re a home brewer and don’t have a scale, please go buy a scale and you just type in how much it weighed. And it does all that calculation for you. One time.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. And I’d love to talk about. How you guys conquer and divided to get this right. John what part did you do on the project? And then Lee, what part did you do on the project?
John Beeler: So it’s interesting, actually. The overwhelming majority of keg cop was Lee’s design and these bills. So all of the hardware that’s associated with it he was working on, I helped out when I could just to, as a sounding board and to provide, some guidance and support where I might know an answer that he might not.
But one of the things that’s interesting is, kid cop is designed to be part of a broader ecosystem. And so one of the things that we’re working on is building out. A replacement for the raspberry pints Apolis system. And so that really is the piece of the project that I’ve mostly been focused on.
That, that piece is separate from QED coffee. It can be built on its own. Uh, QED cock can also be built without having built that system, but they are designed for, to support each other to go hand in hand with each other. And so that system really is is designed with kid cop in mind and vice versa. It’s two different parts of a broader goal to tap management and keg management. Just that much easier both for for home brewers and anyone that wants to see what they have on tape.
Colter Wilson: And then what parts did you know? So obviously. John is working and probably actively working on this digital tablets product, which is probably going to have a more modern look. Is that kind of the idea you’re going after?
John Beeler: Yeah. So the product that we’re working on, it’s called keg screen. And the thing about keg screen is keg screen is an alternative to raspberry PI. It’s a keg and Tapulous management tool. And the real goal of it is, for a home brewer, you want to be able to show your friends what you have on tap. How much of each is each keg that you have is left and what it is that’s being tapped next, all in style. The goal really is to have something that you can point to, you can show off, but that also then helps, okay, I’m getting to the end of this keg. Maybe it’s time to go and brew the next one. The goal for keg screen really is to integrate with as much hardware as possible and as much software as possible. But it really is designed with Ken Kopp in mind. It’s, the idea is that could cut, provides a foundational platform upon which you can leverage it for temperature control.
You can leverage it for managing individual kegs for tracking keg levels keg screen integrates with all that. Keg screen will also integrate with other, flow sensors and other products. Another product that’s related to keg cop that we built is keg cadet, which is designed if you already have a Arduino based system, but she wants to integrate it into into keg screen. You can use that Arduino with the kid cadet firmer, which is an offshoot of QED cop until you’re ready to upgrade your hardware to QED cop. And one of the key things that, that I think you, you had actually hit on is. Raspberry pints. There’s a number of people that are working on the project.
It is receiving a lot of upgrades and a lot of facelifts as a result of what the community is doing, but it’s a hard project to sustain and it’s hard to maintain. And one of the things that keg screen has is, it follows more modern design practices. That’s built on more modern. Software and more modern libraries and it comes with a hundred percent test coverage right off the bat.
If you are know anything about technology, you know what I mean by that? But what that means is as things change and as new features get built in and, new software upgrades come down the pipe, It, every single function that’s in keg screen can be tested in about 45 seconds by running an automated command that will go through and make sure that everything continues to work the way that it’s intended to.
So the idea is that as it grows and expands will be something that will be able to last. Now keg screen is not released yet. There’s I was joking with somebody the other day. I think he put it best, it’s you get something 80% written and that’s the easy part.
And the hard part is the second 80%. And that’s what what we’re at right now is finishing out that second 80%. But if you’re interested in it kegs green.com go sign up. Uh, anyone that signs up there it’s basically a link to a MailChimp a list, but we’re going to be sending out instructions for anyone that’s interested in how to download the alpha once that becomes available. Hopefully here in the next few. So
Lee Bussy: Please. Do I chuckle every time somebody signs up for that? Cause I know how much pressure it puts on John.
John Beeler: Yeah.
we, we’ve got, we have a slack channel that every time somebody signs up, it posts a message in the slack channel yeah it’s terrible for me. It makes me look really bad that it hasn’t been hasn’t been released yet. So it’s coming.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I L I love that you guys are doing this project in slack. It’s it’s like legit software being built. It’s awesome.
Lee Bussy: And, we’ve got help to it. Sometimes it’s a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes it’s bouncing ideas. Yeah. But we’ve got Donnie Jorgensen. Gromit DJ on Homebrew talk. He’s been great. He helps us with a lot of the graphics and the 3d modeling and Derek helps out uncle D on a Homebrew.
Also released a flight. Another developer there, we pulled him in and trying to make him one of us. He’s not one of us yet. He’s in California, but he’s close.
Colter Wilson: And then basically let’s talk about the parts to build a cake cop. So if I’m going to build a K cop and I obviously there’s some hardware involved. We talked about the P 32, but, and obviously a power source, but what, what would it, what parts do I actually need to put one together? And how hard is it?
Lee Bussy: Good question. As John said, if you have respirate pints right now to enter the ecosystem, You flash keg cadet on your UNO, and then you’re done. You’re your toe is in the water. If you have all those flow meters and the wiring and everything already, then really what you need is just that ESP 32, and you can wire it into the controller, all the flow meters you already have.
But there is I have provided the files for the PC boards, the printed circuit boards. There are. Small handful of resistors that, that anybody doing any of these projects is going to have about $8,000 because it costs 16 cents for $5 shipping, a couple of capacitors, some terminal connectors, at least one flow meter, if you don’t have any yet, but you can use it without a flow meter, but it’s a little bit weird to have that sort of flow meter system without a flow meter.
And then optionally, you can have the temperature sensors mentioned that it will control the the temperature of your kegerator or Keizer. And then if you’re doing that or relay in the same relay that you would have, if you’re doing brew pie, all told, I added this up this morning given the economics of buying from China, you’re going to end up with a few extra parts in all this, but it came up to $42 buying three cheap flow meters.
Some printed circuit boards from a Chinese shipper, the controllers, all your passives in a 10 bag of ethernet cables. I decided to use ethernet cables in between the components of this system, rather than have people come up with some kind of Mickey mouse connection. XR connectors are very popular, but they’re also very expensive.
That ethernet cable is something. Everybody knows everybody who owns a computer and pretty much everybody listening to us right now. They’re going to have a couple of those laying around and it makes a real nice form factor to be able to route your wiring.
Colter Wilson: And penny one down is like stupid, easy there. It’s easy to find if you’re going to have to terminate your own wiring for maybe a connector or something like that, it’s just easy to do if you use that form factor.
Lee Bussy: Yeah, it is. But I do use those RJ 40 fives on both ends so that none of them require just plug in.
Colter Wilson: Even better. And then as far as tools do I need to S I do. I have to solder. I have to solder,
Lee Bussy: you do have to solder. So that, that ESP 32, the 82 66 before it, they ship without those familiar headers that the UNO has. So you can’t, you really use a breadboard for it. So you’re very, at the very least going to have to solder those pins on. That however is about the skill level that’s required. If you can solder those headers on there and you can do the rest.
I think there is 13 resistors, 14 resistors. They’re all the same. So you can’t screw that up. They go either way. So you can’t get them in backwards, two capacitors. And then all of those connectors, I was talking about those RJ 45 connectors to solder. It’s really very simple, but you’re going to need a soldering iron.
You’re going to need wire cutters, strippers, crimpers, always handy, normal hand tools and a plan. Really. If you come into this without a plan and just start buying stuff, you’re probably going to have a big box of stuff and not really get to where you want to go. But if you just take a second and this shouldn’t be alien to folks who have kegerators and Keizer is because I see.
These diagrams people draw for years before they ever put their creator together. So I know these folks can plan, just do a quick plan and that way you’ll know exactly what you need. What else do you mean?
John Beeler: . Um, so I think that the plan is the critical part, right? It’s one of the things with keg cop in particular is the fact that it was designed to support a number of different. Setups that you might have. And it really is designed for your situation and your kegerator, your Keizer and there’s a number of different ways that you can build the system. I recently pulled one together. I videoed the entire process because I want to, just to, to document how easy it was to build. For me, the setup that I was targeting was very simple. One tap one flow sensor, one controller, um, And it took me including actually going through and videoing everything 35 minutes from start to finish. Now, there is a lot of point soldering, but again very simple. It’s it’s not a surface Mount components.
So it’s the kind of thing that if you buy a soldering iron, you, you, without even looking at any kind of tutorials on YouTube or anything, you could probably figure out exactly what you need to do. Very simple. I would say, my soldering skills are not great at all. And if I can do it, anyone can do it.
It is a great project. Something that if you’re interested in this, this is a good project for beginners, and it really is designed as something that is approachable and can be implemented over the course of the year.
Colter Wilson: You guys talked about other projects that this interfaces with and you’ve mentioned, Hey, you could get this to work with raspberry pints if you want,
but Raul reality, what other projects have you seen out there, or have you intended that this could work with specifically CAD cop?
Other projects does it interfere?
Lee Bussy: It right now has a support for a generic HTTP end point in that it will send. And folks who are interested in this part will know what I’m talking about. It’ll send Jason to just about anything to be parsed out and used anywhere. It’ll use MQTT. Which means that it can participate in home automation.
Now I do want to do a little bit of specific work with home assistant, but it should be able to do just about anything with a little bit of work. And the thing about those projects is once you start doing them, you start learning how to roll your own. So that was the base functionality I wanted to have as I wanted to have chunk of data sent to box, and then let people do with it, what they did.
But another thing I’d really like to do, I’ve been talking to Mikey from tablets dyo and that is the very next purpose built integration I want to get into there is to be able to use tap list. I O as well.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Just, it would basically be, he gives you an API. You could write to that API, send a dot Jason payload to it, and boom. It would start to show up in there, with that essentially be what that workflow would look like.
Lee Bussy: It is yeah. Much quicker to say than write it out. It turns out,
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Lee Bussy: His API is awesome, but yeah, me getting it there as the slower.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I’m saying it’s easy. It’s not that easy. But then, you guys talked about specifically, a beginner could do this, right? It’s not a, and w the list of parts you gave me. I love that it’s like a couple of capacitors, some resistors that are all the same ones that don’t have directions that they have to do.
It’s all through hole components. You’re not having a bunch of a surface Mount stuff. Just if you’ve never soldered anything, you’re listening to show surface. Mount stuff is super hard to solder, especially with just a basic soldering iron. I personally use flux in a, in the Aragon.
That’s how I do surface Mount stuff, but. I’d love to hear about maybe some common issues you’ve run into with with K-cup already. I’m sure people have built some. And so w what are some of the common issues out?
Lee Bussy: I think that so far it’s been documentation missing. I’ve been working on this for so long. I left the copyright in their 20, 19 to 2021. So we actually did start talking about this project in 2019. COVID hit the world, went crazy and scope creep also happened. But along the line there, I tried to create documentation as I went and I clearly had some misses.
So there’s a few folks. Now this was just released. What a month and a half ago, two months ago, something like that. And anytime you have a project like this, you’ve got to source your circuit boards for instance. So that’s a round trip to China and you’re buying parts, your other parts from China.
So it does take a while to catch hold. So of the people that are working on it right now, I missed telling them some simple things. So we’re updating documentation and John’s done it most recently. So he’s probably got some others.
John Beeler: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think the only thing I noticed was is I think that the one component you had missed was the the actual ESP 32. So you know not a critical component to the build clearly. But,
uh, no I think the key thing really is just, it really comes down to just planning your build in advance.
It’s, if you figure out what your layout is, how you want everything wired up and which components you need It’ll save you a couple of round trips from China on the slow boat. And if you can do that, then that’s the key to success. I think with this.
Lee Bussy: the good news is those round trips on the boat to China. The only thing that you’re. The app’s actively positively going to have to buy from China is those printed circuit boards. But even then I use OSH park for a while. I don’t get any money for seeing their name, of course, but I use them for a lot of my prototypes just because there’s so much quicker.
So if a person wants to spend $25, instead of $2 and 50 cents, they can get them in two to three weeks instead of two to three months. So the rest of it, you can buy it all on Amazon.
Colter Wilson: You do pay a premium for it, but even then a premium for a resistors negligible,
right? It’s it’s yeah. It’s not a ton of money. You take your bill from 40 or 50 bucks to probably 80 bucks would be the equivalent probably devil’s price.
John Beeler: I was going to say, I just ordered all the parts off Mauser. I’ll have to see if I can look up the the costs, but it’s one of those things where I think the only problem with ordering parts for Mauser is that if you order resistors, I want to say it’s 16 cents a piece. If you order them one at a time, or if you order a hundred, I think it’s 2 cents a piece. And so it’s just very interesting how their volume brakes work out. So I think a real risk that you run is you end up with a hundred resistors, like I did, rather than just the the 14 that you need.
Lee Bussy: Which makes the next project very easy. Cause we I’m sure we both have so many parts laying around. Actually John was cleaning off his desk when he was two. York. And he sent me a box of stuff that he no longer needed. So instead of packing, I got, half finished projects and that sort of thing. So we all have arts.
Colter Wilson: I have a box like that too. It’s like half finished product projects that are like even half soldered and not done. I’m full of those.
John Beeler: Well, you’re, You’re about to be full of a couple more. Once I get back to New York and need to clean my desk off again, don’t worry. I’ll make sure we send you a box full of random parts for projects that were never finished and probably never. Yeah,
Colter Wilson: Yeah, you never know. Maybe I’ll finish one. Uh, and then we got I, you guys both support it. Multiple projects. Lee’s got a couple of projects going on. I know John, you’ve got a couple of projects. I think he actually have. I know you do for Ventrac. I know you do tilt bridge, but you also even do a small project. That’s like a brew pie flasher, or it’s a flasher for, uh, ESP boards specifically for Mac. Cause you’re a Mac guy. I’m a Mac guy. I actually use that software. Um, I
John Beeler: believe, believe it or not. I have a version for windows as well. I haven’t actually used it to flash anything, but I’ve been told by people that it works great. yeah. So brew flasher was actually something, it was born out of some frustration that Lee and I both had with regards to some of the projects that we were working on.
And we wanted a way that we could make it so that it was easy for people that were trying to build their own, um, tilt bridge, build their own Bilbrew bubbles. And they need a way to quickly get that firmware onto that board. What brew flasher does is it provides you with an interface that will automatically knows what the various brewing projects are that are out there. And it will allow you to select the project that you want, download the latest firmware and flash into your board without having to go through the steps of downloading files, knowing which files are, which selecting with the flash addresses, it handles all of that for you automatically. From within a self contained, very easy to use app it’s completely free. The projects that are in it are curated. So you’re not going to end up with some random From where the you shouldn’t be using. And what I would say is if you’re interested in flashing something
more recent, sorry.
Lee Bussy: A lot of my firmware is stuff people shouldn’t use. So to be fair, it’s curated by me and John and one or two other people right now. So it’s possible that I do upload crap.
Colter Wilson: Welcome to open source, but
John Beeler: Stay away from the beta versions. That’s basically what it comes
down to. I, what I would say there is if you’re somebody that has a project that you want to maintain, then definitely reach out. If you want to get it into in debris flasher.
If you’re somebody that wants to flash something, then take a look at the software.
It might be what’s right.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, and to me it’s like the brew flasher software. I will tell you, I’m a Mac guy and there was the biggest pain in the butt to flash DSP, a 32 82 66. Even Arduino, at least I could get the Arduino software, but then I had to like, basically it was still even a pain to get some stuff in there and I don’t run a windows emulation.
Cause there obviously were, every time I would get the instructions, it was like here load up windows and I’m like, blah. And then even with Linux, it’s also a little, you got a command line, there was a little bit more to being able to flash. And so I remember when you launched brew flasher and. I was very happy about that. So obviously somebody else felt my pain. But managing that plus this is that, you know, how much work is this guys? I know that, like we talk about open source projects. In all reality we all have day jobs. I have a day job and I do a podcast. You guys have a day job.
You guys are maintaining these open source projects. Yup. These are hobbies within the hobby. How much time are you putting into this? W what’s that, how’s that work-life balance going with these projects and also living your life.
Lee Bussy: I get my commute time back, of course now, since I’m working from home, but it’s not insignificant, speaking for me. Anyway, this is something I love doing. I always find a way to dig myself deep into a rabbit hole, no matter what I’m doing. So as we’re prepping for this thing, I was listed what we’ve got.
So no brew pie is what started John and I both out, down this path. So I’m working on remix. He’s got ferment track. He’s got the bird pie, ESP 82 66 brew flasher tilt bridge. I’ve got brute bubbles now, keg. I’ll bet, 20 hours a week, probably through, with all the projects I’ve got going on with the electronics projects and then there’s the other stuff, but yeah, it takes me a little bit of time.
I love it. I love doing all of it.
John Beeler: Yeah.
it was, I’d say probably about 20 hours a week. Sounds about right. It’s the thing that I would say is for me, it’s beer almost more than I like drinking beer. And I like working on brewing projects almost more than I like brewing. And it’s even before I graduated from one gallon brew kits that you’d buy from from bed bath and beyond to actual, All grain mash bills on a stove top. And I was trying to figure out, okay, can I design a temperature controller that I can use with a Crock-Pot to implement a rudimentary PID algorithm that will allow me to hold my mash temperature at a specific temperature. It was, th those kinds of products were always the thing that appealed.
And it is a hobby unto itself and it’s an enjoyable one and it’s always a nice win be it brew pie remix and the, uh, number of people that have really latched onto that. Be it, you know, people that have reached out with regards to tilt bridge who found it as a good solution for issues that they have. It’s always rewarding when you have a project like that, that you can get out there. People go out, they find use for it and really enjoy. It is rewarding in its own, to be sure.
Colter Wilson: I’d love to talk about how, if I’m interested in this, you guys always build a website for your projects. I love that as well. You don’t just real. Don’t get me wrong. Your support forums, always Homebrew talk. But the point is that a. Where do I find keg cop? Where do I find your other projects?
Lee Bussy: Yeah. Oddly enough, maybe not, oddly enough we start trying to name these things by trying to figure out what domain names are left available. I think I’ve got close to 30 domains registered right now because I changed my mind. That’s a problem my wife doesn’t know about, so hopefully she doesn’t hear me.
But keg cop.com is placed to start with this and keg screen. His place to go and learn a little bit more about keg screen and sign up for that thing. That’s going to ding every time somebody signs up and tell John that he’s not moving fast enough,
John Beeler: I feel called out. What can I say
Lee Bussy: slightly.
Colter Wilson: I get know I like the tension here. It’s good stuff. And then just so you guys all know if you’re listening, we’re on a video call and they’re very much smiling at each other. It’s great. What kind of future stuff are you guys gonna work on? Like obviously we got keg screen screening, keg cop that are eventually going to work together, but what is the overall like?
What is the overall vision here? Feature wise.
Lee Bussy: For me, I think this is fairly close. I want to tighten up the API. So to allow other people to extend this as they should. And I do want to integrate at the tap list, IO Iowa’s functionality. So people can use that if their choice is to use a cloud-based tap list, then I want that to be the way they go.
If their choice is to keep that data in-house and obviously keg screen is going to be the way to go for that. So for me, and this is why the copyright started at 2019 and I released in 2021. It’s pretty close to where I was.
John Beeler: Yeah, I think keg screen, in my head cake screens, one of those things it’s probably never going to be a hundred percent complete for better or worse. The idea with keg screen is you have a platform that you can build upon it. And I think interestingly enough, keg screen actually, and keg cop, weren’t actually the original project that we were discussing there.
There’s an entirely separate. That that we’ve been talking about that we want to implement. That’s going to come after keg screen and QED copper Are built where keg screening, kid cop were parts of that. So there’s definitely more to come. I think that The goal really is to try and build out support for as many things as possible.
Get it so that it’s out there and get it so that hopefully anybody that’s interested in the open source community and taking some of these projects and helping to, both build what it is that they want. And then contribute back. We’ll have the capability to have a platform to then go and build the features that they want to see on top of.
The goal really is to get to that, that in state where it’s something that anybody that wants to can pick up and run.
Colter Wilson: Are you guys working on any new projects other than keg cop?
Lee Bussy: . Yeah. Yeah, oddly enough. And this came out of my Homebrew pack. I started beekeeping or I started learning about beekeeping anyway, from a program called heroes to hives that’s made available for veterans and it’s run out of Michigan state university.
So if anybody’s listening, that is an awesome program. If anyone wants to throw a couple bucks at the program, there’s about 8,000 veterans right now, taking those classes all free to them. It’s really cool. As these things happen, and this is how John and I got roped into this thing together an idea comes out of it and I was talking to a beekeeper across the state and he said what do you like to do?
I like brewing beer, blah, blah, blah. And then I said, and then we have these side projects as soon as I said, controller he bit. So we’ll cut the control. I said temperature and he says tell me more. So we talked about that and a part of, what they’re trying to do is find a way everyone’s hears about this colony collapse disorder and it’s due to a number of things, but one of the things they want to do is control these mites and they’re trying to do it without chemicals.
So it comes into temperature and temperature control is. We’ve said it about 80 bajillion times in this podcast already. We’ve started with temperature control and we throw it into everything we’re doing as a freebie. . So being able to do yet another project for temperature controls, not so bad.
So I’m working on something right now. I’m calling B snuggler. These beekeepers can put some peat on the bees in the winter time. Counter the winter we just had where it was just bitterly cold. And then also do those heat treatments in the summertime to cut down on the bad stuff.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And cool that you’re in the meantime, helping support a really great project. And since you plugged for a charity donation, I’ll make sure I put a link in the show notes at the part of this. know, if you want to, if you want to donate to a heroes to hives we’ll make sure there’s a link there.
So check those show notes. Guys, I want to thank you for coming on homebrewing, DIY. It’s always a pleasure to have you. Now John second time and Lee, your third time. So thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to talk about these open source projects, because in all reality, at my roots, this is where I started podcasting, and this show has grown over the last couple of years, and now I’m like, if you’re listening to this, you probably don’t know this I’m actually in the top 2% of all podcasts globally. I had no idea. I found that out this week. So congratulations. But it is what of is as well as things where it’s like, it all started with talking about these open source projects and how, and to me, Open source projects are the last thing that are really truly hippie we have in the world, right. Only in open source. Do we actually go, Hey, let’s go to a community. Let’s all just do the work together. And oh, we’re going to give it away for free. But the benefits of open source are so big things like having code that everybody can see if it’s secure. The ability to go in and actually have a project that you know, is it’s used in tried it’s tested and at some level, if there’s a problem that you find. It’s easy to go fix. Cause you can just go fix it yourself. And put it as a branch in and it gets accepted and booming becomes part of the main branch. So to me, it is something where open source software is just such a cool workflow and really just a game changer when it comes to software. And it’s weird that that actually exists in reality.
John Beeler: Absolutely. Thank you.
Colter Wilson: I want to thank John and Lee for taking the time to come on the show. As always great to talk to such amazing guests. W I think we have great guests here on homebrewing, DIY. I like to also think 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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