A smart kegarator that tracks temperature and controls the compressor with a web interface and stats
Good beers need precise temperature control, and anal retentive beer drinkers need to know exactly what their beers are doing. So I built a kegarator with a proper control system that allows me to fine tune my temperatures and track exactly what my beers are doing. The kit is based on a standard Lowes chest freezer and a kegarator kit from beveragefactory.com with the control system built with a raspberrypi A+. Temperature sensing is done via a few waterproofed DS18B20 sensors and a Beefcake relay. I control the beefcake relay via a 3.3V to 5V level shifter. They system allows for as many temperature sensors as the 1-wire bus will take. My setup has two sensors on the kegs and one sensor in the control system enclosure, so I can track keg temperatures as well as know that my control system isn't overheating. The config file allows for specifying which sensors determine compressor action.
The web interface is based on Twitter Bootstrap and uses a few graph and guage components. Most of the component licenses are MIT licensed and those that aren't are MIT compatible. The control system code is all GO and fully MIT licensed.
My beer is the perfect temperature at all times and I know exactly what the temperature has been doing. I also know exactly how often I run the compressor and exactly how much it costs me to run my kegarator (except beer, that is priceless).
If you want to distill rather than keep beers frosty, strap the relay to a burner or heater coil and adjust temperatures as needed (minor logic inversion required). If someone is interested in rigging the system up to heat rather than cool I'll happily throw in a switch in the config to invert the logic.