BCS 460 and Android tablet configuration

[sloppybones]

So I am trying to plan out the automation side of my brew plans and I have come to the conclusion that I just want to be able to control temps, pumps, etc from a small Android tablet. I guess my questions is, what else do I need to complete this setup? I have searched other threads for Android based stuff, but it usually is just people talking about software they are writing and what not. Do I need my own emergency stop bottom? Do I need to still go ahead and build a control box? Very new to all this so any bit of info will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[sennister]

I am building a BCS system and am an Android user...

Yes, you still need a control box. This will house the SSRs, Contactors, BCS and such.

I would add an e-stop. There are two ways of wiring it. One way to use the E-Stop to leak power to the ground to trip the GFCI. The other is to use it to cut power to the pumps and elements. In my case I am going to only cut power to the pumps and elements with the E-stop. The reason is that the most likely reason I can see where I would want to hit the E-stop is if I had a hose pop off or some other leak that would likely be quick to fix. If the E-stop tripped the main GFCI breaker it would also cut power to the BCS and I might not know where I was at since the timers would have likely stopped when power was cut.

Now you can control this from an Android Tablet in using the browser. Just go to the IP address of the BCS and log in. Or there is one app that I know of that is out there, a little spendy but it would make it easier to interface with the BCS. I want to test out the web interface on my Nexus 7 vs laptop. Also I am adding momentary push buttons to my control panel. The BCS 460 has 4 discrete inputs which can look for a button press on the panel to then perform some action. For instance maybe your panel has an alarm that sound when you have your first hop addition. Rather than go back to the table which may have timed out and have to log in again, I can just go to the panel and press a button. Like I said you can have up to 4 buttons but that button can do different things at different points of the brew process. In my case I plan on setting up all 4 from the start. I will keep on as the alarm reset and the other 3 as needed in the brew process. Probably many times I will find I don't need them but it will be there if I do and limit the amount of time I need to run back to a tablet or computer.

If you are looking for an app in the Android Market that I mentioned earlier for controlling the BCS 460, the only one I know of is BrewMate. It is out in the Market if you search for it but runs $15. Kind of a lot but the only option if you are not happy with the web interface.

For my build I went with this.

http://www.ebrewsupply.com/shop/ebrew-kits/bcs-controlled/complete50bcs.html

 

[P-J]

...
I would add an e-stop. There are two ways of wiring it. One way to use the E-Stop to leak power to the ground to trip the GFCI. The other is to use it to cut power to the pumps and elements. In my case I am going to only cut power to the pumps and elements with the E-stop. The reason is that the most likely reason I can see where I would want to hit the E-stop is if I had a hose pop off or some other leak that would likely be quick to fix. If the E-stop tripped the main GFCI breaker it would also cut power to the BCS and I might not know where I was at since the timers would have likely stopped when power was cut.
...

I really like your thoughts on the E-Stop functions. The next drawing I make I will try implementing your thoughts to provide 2 E-Stops for both.

Thanks.

P-J

 

[sennister]

I really like your thoughts on the E-Stop functions. The next drawing I make I will try implementing your thoughts to provide 2 E-Stops for both.

Thanks.

P-J

Hey P-J, the thanks should be directed to you and all that you do for people here. I have seen your drawings and love them.

I know in your design you typically trip the GFCI. Some like the fact that this totally removes all power going into the panel. Of course when there is only a single E-Stop that just cuts the power to the elements and pumps there is still power going to the panel. So your normal design is probably is a little safer. Never thought of a second E-Stop. That kind of the best of both worlds.

I have gone back and forth on if I wanted to use a design like your normal one where you trip the GFCI seeing the benefit of that but the fact that the BCS is run off the main power, I would be less likely to hit it if there were a minor issue like a leak that I wanted to address because I would loose where I was at in the brew day. I would imagine that PID based systems that use a timer built into the panel (like Kal's) would suffer from the same fate. I don't recall if Kal's builds trip GFCI or just element/pump. I mainly mentioned his build as it is a design known by many here that uses a timer device.

I guess this is a benefit of running a separate kitchen type timer.

It really comes down to what you feel is an appropriate level of risk for you and what your operating environment is like. Tripping the GFCI could really be a pain if you had the breaker in your main panel way down in the basement when you brew in the garage. Granted you shouldn't be tripping it all that often. If everything goes as planned anyhow.

 

[heckels]

Well, damn it. Now I need to add a stop to cut the power to my main contactor. I like that idea.

 

[sennister]

Well, damn it. Now I need to add a stop to cut the power to my main contactor. I like that idea.

How is your current E-Stop wired now? Does it trip the GFCI? If so you don't want to cut power to the main contactor with a second E-stop. In most cases that would still cut power to PIDs/Timers/BCS or whatever might be inside the panel.

As I mentioned I went with a complete kit from EBrewSupply. This shows what the schematic looks like in a panel which the E-stop will only kill the power to the elements and pumps.

http://www.ebrewsupply.com/designs/50a-BCS-2-Electric.pdf

If you look at what he is doing in this design he has contactors that get the coil feed from the E-stop. Also the power for the pumps come off this as well. That way when the E-stop is hit, the cotactors for the elements loose the 120V across the coil so they cut power to the elements. Also the SSRs on the pumps loose power on the switch side.

Probably not the only way of doing it but it is how he did his panel design. Mine will probably look pretty close to that being I got his complete kit.

 

[heckels]

The BCS is on the leg opposite the others. The main contactor controls the other hot leg and that runs the pumps.

 

[sloppybones]

Hey guys, thanks for the responses. Good insight from everyone. I am definitely digging the 2 E-stops. I think that is a great idea. I think I am going to stick to a basic switch set up for now that includes 2 pump on/offs, temp probe plugs, 2 e-stops and an on/off for the whole system. I can always expand later once I learn how to do everything properly.

 

[ChuckO]

I placed my BCS-460 in a separate enclosure powered from a different 110v source so that it is completely separate from the brewery electrical cabinet. All connections go over two CAT5 cables utilizing all 16 wires. That way I can have an e-stop that does both functions, breaking the main contactor latching circuit as well as leaking current through a resistor to ground to trip the GFCI.

 

[sennister]

I placed my BCS-460 in a separate enclosure powered from a different 110v source so that it is completely separate from the brewery electrical cabinet. All connections go over two CAT5 cables utilizing all 16 wires. That way I can have an e-stop that does both functions, breaking the main contactor latching circuit as well as leaking current through a resistor to ground to trip the GFCI.

I kind of like this idea. My BCS and other panel parts will be here tomorrow so I will be starting the build here pretty soon. I could pick up a J-box pretty cheap and have it in there and run the connections over Cat5 like you said. Just use a regular GFCI 110V outlet so it is protected but it doesn't need to be right next to the brewery. Another plus of this is that I have a concern about the wireless bridge I am using with this, I have seen where ebrewsupply has the wireless bridge in the main control panel. I would imagine having that in a big metal box will really limit the range of the wifi connection quite a bit. If I had it all in a plastic J-box, it wouldn't be as big of a problem.

 

[sloppybones]

I kind of like this idea. My BCS and other panel parts will be here tomorrow so I will be starting the build here pretty soon. I could pick up a J-box pretty cheap and have it in there and run the connections over Cat5 like you said. Just use a regular GFCI 110V outlet so it is protected but it doesn't need to be right next to the brewery. Another plus of this is that I have a concern about the wireless bridge I am using with this, I have seen where ebrewsupply has the wireless bridge in the main control panel. I would imagine having that in a big metal box will really limit the range of the wifi connection quite a bit. If I had it all in a plastic J-box, it wouldn't be as big of a problem.

Hey Sennister,

Did you order it pre-assembled? Or are you putting it together yourself? Trying to figure out what to do with mine. I have experience with building PCs, but this seems way more advanced haha. Let me know how it goes!

 

[gunmetal]

My E-stop also cuts all power to the pumps and elements, but gives power to the bcs. I do have the BCS protected by its own 1 amp fuse. When I power the brewery up, I have the E-stop depressed, log into the BCS, and verify that all elements are off before powering up the whole system. I have never had a problem with an element being powered up, but I don't want to dry fire them either. I also run a RIMS system, so in the event of a stuck mash and risk of scortching wort and ruining a brewday, I can hit the E-stop and still monitor temperatures, until a problem is fixed. I have never had to use the E-stop for this reason, but it is there if needed.

 

[sennister]

Hey Sennister,

Did you order it pre-assembled? Or are you putting it together yourself? Trying to figure out what to do with mine. I have experience with building PCs, but this seems way more advanced haha. Let me know how it goes!

I ordered the kit that I posted a link to in my first post in this thread. It is the 50A complete DIY kit. So lots of assembly required. I also spoke to them before ordering and modified things a bit. Rather than get the standard enclosure he lists with the kit I opted for this one.

http://www.ebrewsupply.com/shop/more/enclosures/encl6x5x2.html

It is a little bigger to give me more room and keep things from getting so crammed in there. It was $50 more than the standard enclosure so in my communications with him I asked if I could order the Wifi option to the kit as it costs $50 but apply the $50 to the enclosure change. By doing this it covered the difference in the cost of the larger enclosure and was easier to do the order on the web without trying to do a strange order. I already have a wireless bridge which is all that the wifi option is.

I also added the optional alarm kit which includes one of the momentary discrete input push buttons. Then I added another 3 of the buttons to max out all 4 inputs in the event I might want them. They were a couple bucks each so not like this jacked up the price a lot.

In the case of my order it has taken quite a while. He was having some supply issues which dragged things out a bit. Then I was out of town for a bit. I did tell him that I wasn't in a hurry. With the holidays I wouldn't have time to work on it and then I knew I was out of town. So, in seeing from his facebook site he had a lot of orders, and supply issues. I said he could push my order back a bit and hold shipping until I was back home. He shipped it Monday when I was back and I just got the UPS notification that it is scheduled for delivery tomorrow. The only reason I went through all this rather than just holding off on ordering things until I was ready was because he had a special on the 50A DIY Complete kit that I ordered over Black Friday weekend. Yeah, I ordered it way back on Dec 1. It has been a long wait but like I said it was partly due to supplier issues he was having, the changes to the enclosure that I requested and the delay in shipping that I requested.

The build shouldn't be that bad. I ordered an extra E-stop should I decide to go with dual stops like we were discussing earlier. Haven't made up my mind for certain yet if I will add both. For the most part my plan will follow the diagrams that they have on the website and the documentation that he sends with the kit. Not sure what it looks like yet but I can tell you tomorrow afternoon. Really the only change I am looking at is going to be possibly be a voltmeter/ampmeter and the E-stop. While I am not an electrician, I have taken electronics courses when in school for my degree in the IT field.

I will will likely start a thread on my build. I may wait a bit before starting the thread in this section though. I will wait until I make a bit of progress, maybe once I start cutting the panel as I will have worked through the plan by then.

 

[ChuckO]

Putting the wireless bridge in a plastic J-box along with the BCS is not a bad idea. Neither has much current draw and the plastic box would not block any of the wireless signal. I wouldn't even worry about having them on a GFCI circuit either, as they will not be located near the wet areas of the brewery and can be in an unventilated box.

My BCS is near the location where my home network enters the garage from the house, so I simply cut the cable and put a 4 port switch in the line, one port back to the house, one port upstairs to my office, one port for the BCS and the last port for an old computer dedicated to running brewery related software & HomeBrewTalk internet.

 

[sennister]

Putting the wireless bridge in a plastic J-box along with the BCS is not a bad idea. Neither has much current draw and the plastic box would not block any of the wireless signal. I wouldn't even worry about having them on a GFCI circuit either, as they will not be located near the wet areas of the brewery and can be in an unventilated box.

My BCS is near the location where my home network enters the garage from the house, so I simply cut the cable and put a 4 port switch in the line, one port back to the house, one port upstairs to my office, one port for the BCS and the last port for an old computer dedicated to running brewery related software & HomeBrewTalk internet.

In my bin o'random electrical stuff I have a few 120V GFCI outlets. So not a big deal to add one for extra safety. Not sure where I will put the J-box. Might be close to the brewery. I have a spool of CAT5 so I can make the cables whatever length I need. In my case I have Gigabit copper run out to my polebarn/shop where I will be setting up the electric brewery. I could hardwire it or do the bridge. I want to test out a few things. The local home brew shop lets us do brew sessions there if we want and people bring in their electric systems so people can check them out and learn on them. I am the first in the club to go down the BCS path so there has been some interest in that. While I could do a crossover cable to the laptop to control things in a demo brew. It would probably be easier to do an Ad-hoc network which is where the wireless bridge would come in handy.

The stuff is out for delivery so I will be looking over stuff tonight. Probably decide on what I want to do for placement of the BCS. My initial thought was to just install a panel mount RJ45 socket. Then mount the bridge to the outside of the panel. Then if I wanted hardwire I could do that or plug in the bridge. I want to see how big the BCS is along with all the other parts. Being I went with the larger enclosure I might have so much room that I end up just skipping the J-box. I will have to think about it over the next week or so.

 

[sennister]

Well I got my stuff yesterday and went through everything. Missing a few things from the order but they are correcting it and will get the missing items out today. Should have everything early next week.

I laid out what I have which is everything that will be inside the panel. I have a lot of room in there. I also missed that the panel came with a RJ45 Panel mount jack. I was going to order at least one so good thing I waited. I think what I will be doing is to wire the network out on the BCS to the panel mount RJ45 jack. From there I have the option of plugging in my hardwired network cable which would run to the switch in my shop or plug the wifi bridge in.

Even though the panel isn't build yet I wanted to check out the BCS. So I put it on my desk in the office and hooked it up to the switch in there so I could start on basic configuration of it. Set up the authentication and basic configuration. Then set up my router so it has a reservation and have port forwarding set up for now so that I can connect to it remotely from work and such. I tried accessing it with the phone (Nexus 4) and tablet (Nexus 7). The interface is usable but pretty small. So I bought the app Brewmate that I mentioned. Configured it but it doesn't seem to be able to connect to my BCS. I wrote the developer and he is thinking he needs to look at it again. I guess he hasn't really done anything with it in a couple years and he is thinking he doesn't have the same firmware that the new ones are running. I mentioned the authentication and that I didn't see in the app where I could enter a password. He said he didn't think his system had that so he would have to look at it. While I could disable authentication so there isn't a password, I wouldn't want to leave it open to the outside world like that. Last thing I need is someone to do a port scan on my router IP, see the port open and log in. They could start a brew session on an empty kettle or turn no a pump and burn it up. Not that I would leave it on all the time but it is possible.

Oh I mentioned the discrete input buttons. I mentioned that I have one that came with the optional alarm and I ordered another 3 to max out the inputs. I knew I would have one for the alarm but wasn't sure what I would do with the others but maxed it out since I didn't want to get everything done and a couple brews in finding I wish I would have added another button. They were about $3 each so it isn't like it is a huge cost. Well I was reading a thread on here yesterday where I saw something interesting. There is a guy that starts his boil process then uses two discrete input buttons to control the duty cycle on the main element. He presses one button to raise the duty cycle by 5% and another to lower it. This lets him fine tune the boil without having to go back to the laptop and tweak things. That is pretty cool. I was thinking about using a couple of them to be able to cycle the pumps if I want but the panel does have a 3 position switch for each pump so I can do that with it. The positions are on/off/auto. That will probably work better anyhow as I read that the discrete button doesn't work really well for this.

I still have a lot to work out for programming the processes but I am finally going to be starting on this pretty soon.

 

[sloppybones]

Well I got my stuff yesterday and went through everything. Missing a few things from the order but they are correcting it and will get the missing items out today. Should have everything early next week.

I laid out what I have which is everything that will be inside the panel. I have a lot of room in there. I also missed that the panel came with a RJ45 Panel mount jack. I was going to order at least one so good thing I waited. I think what I will be doing is to wire the network out on the BCS to the panel mount RJ45 jack. From there I have the option of plugging in my hardwired network cable which would run to the switch in my shop or plug the wifi bridge in.

Even though the panel isn't build yet I wanted to check out the BCS. So I put it on my desk in the office and hooked it up to the switch in there so I could start on basic configuration of it. Set up the authentication and basic configuration. Then set up my router so it has a reservation and have port forwarding set up for now so that I can connect to it remotely from work and such. I tried accessing it with the phone (Nexus 4) and tablet (Nexus 7). The interface is usable but pretty small. So I bought the app Brewmate that I mentioned. Configured it but it doesn't seem to be able to connect to my BCS. I wrote the developer and he is thinking he needs to look at it again. I guess he hasn't really done anything with it in a couple years and he is thinking he doesn't have the same firmware that the new ones are running. I mentioned the authentication and that I didn't see in the app where I could enter a password. He said he didn't think his system had that so he would have to look at it. While I could disable authentication so there isn't a password, I wouldn't want to leave it open to the outside world like that. Last thing I need is someone to do a port scan on my router IP, see the port open and log in. They could start a brew session on an empty kettle or turn no a pump and burn it up. Not that I would leave it on all the time but it is possible.

Oh I mentioned the discrete input buttons. I mentioned that I have one that came with the optional alarm and I ordered another 3 to max out the inputs. I knew I would have one for the alarm but wasn't sure what I would do with the others but maxed it out since I didn't want to get everything done and a couple brews in finding I wish I would have added another button. They were about $3 each so it isn't like it is a huge cost. Well I was reading a thread on here yesterday where I saw something interesting. There is a guy that starts his boil process then uses two discrete input buttons to control the duty cycle on the main element. He presses one button to raise the duty cycle by 5% and another to lower it. This lets him fine tune the boil without having to go back to the laptop and tweak things. That is pretty cool. I was thinking about using a couple of them to be able to cycle the pumps if I want but the panel does have a 3 position switch for each pump so I can do that with it. The positions are on/off/auto. That will probably work better anyhow as I read that the discrete button doesn't work really well for this.

I still have a lot to work out for programming the processes but I am finally going to be starting on this pretty soon.

Sounds awesome so far! Keep me updated. Post some pics if ya can.

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