angryMrTom

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have been 3D printing for about a year now, its had its ups and downs, good times and bad. Some times its the greatest thing, and sometimes I’m glad I don’t keep a baseball bat near my 3D Printer, because I may not still be the owner of one if I did. I know all printers are different and everyone has their reasons for why or what they do and use for the build surface. I have the Ender3, its a great entry level printer for the price and I have spit out some amazing prints. But one the most notorious issues with the Ender3 is the warped bed. It seems like everyone has reported this issue. And I think one thing all 3D Printer Hobbyist could agree on, is the first layer is one of the most important parts of the print. And when you printing around .2mm layer hight, if the build surface isn’t perfect you’re going to have problems, especially with larger prints.

There are a few things you could do about this, such as, just deal with it, replace the bed with something higher grade, or add a new surface, such as a piece of glass. I chose to use a sensor on the hot end. I went with the BLTouch sensor. It’s pretty much just a probe, that will make a mesh of your build surface and allow for your Z axis to compensate for the imperfect surface with very small up and down Z axis movements.

Now, I know there is a lot of YouTube videos out there on how to setup and use a BLTouch sensor, but, everything I found when I was setting mine up, was with using the Marlin firmware. Either Vanilla Marlin or the TH3D flavor. Well, to complicate things even more, I am using Klipper. I’m not going to dive into much about Klipper in this blog post, as its not really the focus. Either you are already using Klipper and you know what it is, so keep reading, or go research Klipper and see if its for you. Because these settings will NOT work with any flavor of the Marlin firmware.

Values You’ll Need

There are values you need when setting up your BLTouch, namely the X and Y offsets from the nozzle to the BLTouch, you can either measure these or, if you are using third party mods on your hot end, a lot of the designers will specify these values. I am using the Bullseye Cooling Fan Duct and the designer has provided the offset values on the Thingiverse page. Using the Bullseye Fan Duct and the provided mount, the offsets are X -42, Y -5.

Next, you will need to know your bed size, the bed that ships with the Ender3 is 220x220mm. You need to know this for creating a bed mesh, which is what the BLTouch will build when probing.

Get Configuring

Here are the settings you need to add or update on in your Klipper printer.cfg:

You need to change the endstop_pin value to use a virtual endstop, this is in the z_stepper section.
- endstop_pin: probe:z_virtual_endstop
You need to allow the Z Axis to go below the ‘0’ mark for negative warp, this can be done by editing the position_min value, also in the z_stepper section.
- position_min: -3
You need to define the [bltouch] section and values in the configuration file (a section is defined with square brackets, this section does not exist in the Ender3 printer.cfg by default, so you will need manually create it). You can see that the X and Y offsets are the values I got from the Thingiverse page.
```
[bltouch]
sensor_pin: ^PC4
control_pin: PA4
x_offset: -47.0
y_offset: -5.0
z_offset: 1.65
speed: 5.0
samples: 2
sample_retract_dist: 8.0
```
- The samples value is how many times it checks each location in the bed mesh, more samples will take longer.
Next, the [bed_mesh] section needs to be manually defined.
```
[bed_mesh]
speed: 80
horizontal_move_z: 5
min_point: 50,30
max_point: 230,230
probe_count: 5,5
```
- The probe_count is how many samples its going to take, 5,5 is a 5x5 grid, a bigger grid will take longer, but may be more accurate.
- The min_point and max_point is how big your bed is, with the 220x220mm build plate, 230x230mm is about as large as you can go.
Now, add the [homing_override] section. You can do what ever you want here, I am just setting the Z axis to home in the middle of the bed.
```
[homing_override]
set_position_z:0
gcode:
 G1 Z10 F600
 G28 X Y
 G1 X166 Y120 F6000
 G28 Z
```
- PRO TIP: gcode sections in the printer.cfg need to be 4 spaced or you will get errors.
There is one last thing to do, and that is configure your start and end gcode sequences to tell klipper to generate the bed mesh and use it. This command is BED_MESH_CALIBRATE called after G28 (the homing override). Now, here is what I do, I keep my start and end gcode sequences in the Klipper printer.cfg as gcode_macros. This allows me to use multiple slicers and keep my start and end gcode the same. I have them mapped to START_PRINT and END_PRINT, then in any slicer i am using, I can just put those in and let Klipper handle the sequences. I have included my printer.cfg at the bottom of this page so you take a look at my start up and end print gcode.

Configure The Z Offset

So, for me this was the hardest part, I had the probe working, and at least stopping from crashing into the bed, but, I couldn’t figure out how to actually make the printer know the space from the probe being triggered, to the bottom of the nozzle. Which is obviously crucial for the hotend to know how much lower to go past the point where the BLTouch is triggered and be the perfect height above the bed to start printing. Well, its actually really simple. At least thats how I feel about it now that I know how to do it. And after figuring it out, the only time I have had to re-calibrate my Z offset is when I replace the nozzle.

Go into your printer.cfg and change the z_offset to 10 in the [bltouch] section. This number is completely arbitrary. Just need a value there, and one that will be easy to do math with later.
Home the printer, G28. as long as your [bltouch] settings are correct, the BLTouch pin should engage, and the Z axis should lower and stop, once its triggered. I kept my finger on the power button at this point to stop the hotend from crashing into the bed if need be.
Next tell the printer to go into Relative Position mode: G91
Now move the hotend over the spot the BLTouch probed to home the bed: G1 X-47
Get a piece of paper and get ready to bed level like you always do, lower the Z axis by -.05 until the nozzle scrapes the paper. You can do this with the display control, or I use OctoPod on my iOS device.
Once the Z axis is where it needs to be, you can run GET_POSISTION in the terminal and then just do the math:
- [printer.cfg [bltouch] z_offset] - [z value from GET_POSITION] = z_offset
- IE: 10 - 8.5 = 1.5
Replace your the z_offset value in the [bltouch] section with your new calculated value.
Print and be happy as your first layer runs perfect!

I actually left my printer off for about 4 weeks recently, turned it on and fired off a print, first layer still layed perfect. Cheers!

Update

20190609 - A recent Klipper update moved the samples: 2 and sample_retract_distance: 8.0 from the [bed_mesh] section to the [bltouch] section. I have updated this article to reflect those changes.

My Ender3 Klipper printer.cfg

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure out there who needs to hear this, but clean your beer lines! After a while of beer sitting, lines begin to stain and leave flavors that will be picked up by other beers. I mean who wants to have a lingering coffee porter in your NEIPA? No one, thats who. There is no one size fits all for how often you should clean your lines, it depends a lot on things like how long the beer has been siting in them, how often are they used, and what style of beer. In the past, I would just replace the lines every 6 months. There is a few things wrong with doing this, first of all, its costly, second of all, its a pain in that ass, and third, six months between cleaning/replacing is too long IMO. Now I am rinsing lines every other month. Maybe that is too often, but after you see how easy it is to do, I could do it even more often and not really mind.

Build It

So, the most important part of this build, is the pump. The good news is, if you built a keg washer based on my last post (CIP DIY Keg Washer), then you already have a pump that will work perfect for this. That pump has the power to push cleaner through 4 taps, each with 10’ of beverage line. If you have more then 4 taps, either you’ll have to do it in sections, or you may need a more powerful pump.

Here is the basic premise of this line cleaner, you are going to pump cleaner INTO tap #1, then connect that line to the tap line next to it, so the cleaner will be coming OUT tap #2. Then you connect tap #2 to tap #3, and again, connect tap #3 and tap #4 lines together, and this will cause the cleaner to come out tap #4, and back into the the bucket that the pump is in, allowing for the cleaner to be continuously recirculated through all taps and lines.

TLDR Connect everything together in a way allowing for cleaner to be pumped into tap #1 and come out tap #4.

A key component of this will be hooking beverage line to beverage line. Which means you need a custom fitting allowing for disconnect to connect to disconnect. If you have old kegs lying around, I guess you could steal pieces from that. You could buy posts, but that would way more expensive then just replacing the lines regularly. Im sure you already know what I did…of course, I designed something that could be 3D printed (Thingiverse link).

I’m actually pretty proud of this design, it was pretty in depth to make, and I got to learn some really interesting things with Fustion360 (something similar, not designed by me, but the same concept for ball locks can be found here). I printed two of these, allowing me to connect pin lock to pin lock disconnects together.

I had to get some rubber O-rings for them, #10 faucet O-rings from my local hardware store. I don’t normally discuss print settings for things because there is so many variables, but one thing I will say, is print these at 100% infill as pressurized liquid will be flowing through them. Or, if you don’t want to go the route of connecting beer lines together via the disconnects, if the barbs on your disconnects are removable, the you could remove the disconnect and use a pressure fitting to connect them. I like the way I have it, because its also cleaning the disconnects this way.

Outside of those two major things, the only other parts you need is a barb to go in place of your CIP Ball on your keg washer (see previous post), some hose or tubing, I just use the same silicone tube I use when kegging, and some actual BLC (Beer Line Cleaner).

Use It

After you have all together, the rest is easy, mix up enough BLC in a bucket to submerge your pump, run your pump into tap #1, connect tap #1 line to tap #2 line, connect tap #2 to tap #3, I just used a small piece of silicone tube for this, then connect tap #3 line to tap #4 line. BE SURE TO OPEN ALL YOUR TAPS! Turn the pump on and let the liquid flow though your keezers veins, and come out tap #4. Now, my taps are close enough together I can do this with a five gallon bucket, but you may have to get creative if thats not the case for you.

Thats pretty much it, let that recirculate for 15-20 minutes. Empty the bucket and fill with hot clean water, and rinse for 10 minutes. I usually rinse for 5 minutes, empty the bucket, fill again with hot clean water, and rinse another 5.

Thats it. And I’m sure the patrons of your homemade beer will have much praise to give on how fresh and clean your homebrew has become. Cheers!

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ok Ok, its time for an easy build, no software, no programing, no CLI (command line interface) this one is cake, you don’t even need any tools, just some time (and money), and it will make washing your kegs easy peasy. And, in a later post, I’ll show you how to easily turn this washer into a keezer beer line cleaner!

So, frankly, F washing kegs! I mean if you are going to do it right you need to disassemble, remove the dip tube, wash, wash, rinse, rinse, blah blah. Ain’t no one got time for that! I’ve got a nice little build here that doesn’t break the bank and works pretty damn well. lets get to it!

Ok, down to business, this really doesn’t even need a build walk through but, I’m gonna give a little one, because……the pump works great to clean your beer lines as well (post to come) so I hope you buy one. This list going to be a little lack luster, because I bought some of it at my local hardware. But the few things you can get online are:

Submersible Pump
CIP Spray Ball
Liquid Keg Disconnect (I use pin lock)
Some hose or tube im sure you have laying around, only need like 6”. Size is variable as the pump comes with multiple barbs.
A bucket.
I used under ground sprinkler 1/2” NPT PVC (this is what I got at my locale hardware).

So, this build is pretty flipping easy. Basically, you just need a PVC tube up from the pump outlet, with the CIP Ball on top, now I added a T at the bottom, used a 6” tube, a T, and a 16” tube, and used a barb that comes with the pump and a short piece of hose to the liquid disconnect to shoot cleaner/rinse up the dip tube as well. Then the concept is straight forward, just fill a bucket with some water and oxyclean, put your keg cleaner in there and shoot hot oxyclean through the keg for a while and then switch it with clean hot water and rinse!

Boom, a keg cleaner. For me, I use old 7.75gal kegs as fermenters, so I use this to clean them as well. Works really good.

cake! easy peasy build! BEER TIME!

Sources

https://beer.thegremlyn.com/2017/03/15/i-built-a-keg-washer-you-should-too/

PiLess BrewPi

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Its no secret that temperature control is a huge aspect of brewing beer successfully. It can have dramatic side effects if you don’t keep the temperature in the yeasts range, or you may not be able to achieve flavors that you’re seeking from the yeast fermenting at a specific temperature. Now, in my past life as @dotps1, I covered in detail how to make a BrewPi. A temperature controller running with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino board (that blog post can be found here, for now anyway, I’m not sure how long I will be keeping https://dotps1.github.io up). The BrewPi is defiantly a solid temperature controller solution, that allows for many customization, and the ability to create temperature profiles, allowing for temperature ramp up and cold crashing. And most importantly, it handles temperature swing. Unfortunately, the BrewPi is no longer officially supported on the Raspberry Pi/Arduino configuration, and as you can see the branch hasn’t been touched in years, https://github.com/BrewPi/brewpi-www/tree/legacy. I made this clear in my last walk through, which is over a year old now, and I had to fork the project and fix a bunch of dependency issues, that probably are already out of date.

Enter the PiLess BrewPi

So, theres another implementation of the BrewPi software out there, called BrewPiLess. And the best part is, it doesn’t need a Raspberry Pi, or even an Arduino Controller! And the project is actively developed, which means new features, and bug fixes. One of the really great features the BrewPiLess has, is that it supports logging data to BrewFather. There you can attach the device to a batch, and keep track of the temperature as the batch is fermenting, and all the data is stored in one place.

I was able to get this up and running, oh, I’d say about 10x faster then I got the BrewPi up. However, if you read my last blog on makeing a BrewPi, I housed everything in an outdoor sprinkler control box, it was huge and there where power cords and temperature probes hanging all over the place. Well this time, I wanted something fully modular, where all the cords where removable, and much much smaller. As small as absolutely possible. I reached my goal, but if you want your BPL exactly the same as mine, you will need to solder some connections in this build, and have access to a 3D Printer for the enclosure. These are not show stoppers, there is plenty of other ways to put everything together, this is just my way based on the things I regretted doing when I built my BrewPi, and features I wanted in this build.

Shopping List

Most of this stuff comes in bulk, so find a buddy that wants one too, and split the cost!

ESP8266 NodeMCU (you don’t need two of these, but at that price, might as well, the second one is almost free)
Two Channel Relay Module
20x4 LCD Module (this is optional if you would like a display on the controller)
AC->DC 5V PSU (this acts a power supply unit inside the enclosure, powering all the componets, else you can power things with USB bricks, but that sounds like a mess)
Mini XLR Male connectors (2 needed) (these are optional allowing for the temperature probes to be disconnected from the enclosure)
Mini XLR Female connectors (2 needed) (these are optional allowing for the temperature probes to be disconnected from the enclosure)
AC 3-Pin Outlets (2 needed)
3-Position Screw Terminal
AC Rocker Switch
DS18B20 Temperature Probes (2 needed)
4.7k Resistor (only 1 is needed, but good luck finding just 1 for sale)
Breadboard Jumpers (really only need female jumpers for this project)
Misc screws, wire, shrink tube, and wire nuts/connectors

Pro Tip

I am going to suggest starting this project by printing the enclosure. I am going to suggest this for a few reasons, first of all, most the customization I used in my build are only really needed if you are going to use my enclosure design. Things like the plugs, XLR connections, AC Rocker Switch and the LCD are all going to work perfect in my enclosure, Second, it takes a bit to print, and well, everything mounts in the enclosure, so you’re going to kinda need that part right away. If you’re not going to use my design, you can probably skip this part, and just mock everything up so you can figure out how your going to house this contraption.

The enclosure I designed is available on Thingiverse. It is one of the first things I’ve designed, so I’m sure there are things that could be done better but it works well enough for what it is. I’m not going to go into print settings for this as its out of the scope of this walk through. So, if you’re going this route, download the stl and get it printing because it will take a bit, you can print the lid while you are assembling the rest of the BPL.

Time to make the chimi-f***ing-changas

So, the first thing I want to say about this system, is that its dealing with 110v AC power, you will be running that power to the AC->DC converter (the NodeMCU and LCD run on DC power), and to the relay module, which essentially turns on/off your power outlets, which will control your Heating and Cooling in your fermentation chamber. I cannot over stress this enough, IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WORKING WITH ELECTRICITY OR DON’T KNOW HOW BASIC ELECTRICAL WIRING WORKS, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING, PUT YOUR TOOLS DOWN, AND FIND SOMEONE WHO DOES! Ok, with that being said, lets get down to business.

Install the BrewPiLess bin on the ESP8266 NodeMCU

Download the BrewPiLess Repository:
- git clone https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess.git
If you don’t have it installed, you will need to download and install VSCode.
Open the repository in VSCode. If you don’t have Platform.io installed, go to the extensions workspace and install it.
- On my mac, it failed to install the first, and it was because virtualenv needed to be installed. Completing the three steps listed in the Perquisites section here, and then uninstall/reinstall the extension fixed the issue.
Connect the NodeMCU to your computer via USB, and flash the bin to the board (make sure you are in the working directory of the repo):
- command+shit+p
  - >PlatformIO: Build
  - >PlatformIO: Upload
  - >PlatformIO: Clean
After the flash is complete, the NodeMCU will begin broadcasting its own SSID, you need to connect to to this WiFi network to configure it to connect to your home WiFi.
- Username: brewpiless
- Password: brewpiless
- Open a browser it should auto connect to a config page, where you can change the username, password, and the title.
- Save the changes and on the next page enter you home wireless info.
- After this is complete you can connect back to your home wifi.

Soldering

There are a few things to solder, and some need to be done before assembly:

Solder your wires to the AC->DC 5V PSU, you won’t be able to do this after its in the enclosure.
- On the POWER IN side, you need 14-16 AWG wire, basically the same wire thats in the walls of your house, I clipped an old Molex computer cable and stole wire from that. This wire needs to be heavier gauge because it will have the 110v that is coming from your house to it, then will convert that to 5v DC.
- On the POWER OUT side, you need THREE Hot and Ground leads. These will power the NodeMCU, LCD and Relay. Just clip one end of the breadboard jumper wires for this.
- you can either solder the wire right to the board, or there is screw terminals that you could get as well, that you would solder to the board, and then you can screw the wires into the terminals, the choice is yours.
The temperature probes need to be soldered to the female XLR connectors, the wire to pin layout don’t matter really, just as long as you do both of them the same.
- Unscrew the connector, put the plastic housing over the temperature probe wire, and solder the three wires from the probe to the three pin cups on the connector.
- Repeat this step for the other temperature probe.
- One thing I did was cut one probe a bit shorter then the other, for two reasons. First, the probe to monitor the fridge temperature didn’t need to be 6’ long. Second, it makes it easier for me to keep track of which probe is for the chamber temperature and which is for the beer temperature.
While you have your solder gear out, might as well solder the wires to the male fittings as well.
- Sacrifice a few jumper wires for this, I would recommend using the same colors as the wires that where in the temperature probes so you can keep every thing lined up. The connectors are keyed so they can only go together one way.
- leave about 2-3 inches (cut a jumper in half) of wire, these will connect to the three position screw terminal that is directly behind the connectors in the enclosure (see the layout image below).
- Solder the wires to the pin cups, again, be sure your wire colors match up, your basically just making a pass thru connection in the enclosure, that is detachable if need be.

Assembly

Wiring diagram: Layout diagram (I wasn’t able to find a 3D model of the AC-DC 5V PSU, that goes in with the Power IN facing way from the the LCD in the big empty space):

At this point, you can start putting all the pieces in the enclosure.
- Place each board on its mounting posts, I used old computer motherboard screws to hold them down.
- The three position screw terminal I glued to the post.
Use the diagram above to connect all the jumpers.
- The power for the NodeMCU will be supplied from the AC->DC 5V PSU to the 5V pin on the board.
- Connect a ground lead from the AC->DC 5V PSU to any ground on the NodeMCU board.
- In the diagram it shows the 5V pin is used to power the relay module, but that is assuming the NodeMCU is being powered VIA the USB port. Which is not the case, the 5V (maybe also labeled ‘Vin’) pin on the board will be used to power the NodeMCU itself, and then you can use one of the 3 power leads from the AC->DC 5V PSU to power the relay module.
- Be sure to add the resistor in the three position screw terminal when wiring in the temperature probes.
Next wire in the power switch and the outlets.
- AC Rocker switch wiring digram:
- From the power switch you will have three leads, 1 to the AC->DC 5V PSU, and 1 for each outlet. I used lever action wire nuts for this connection because there is 4 14AWG wires connecting at this point.
- The Relay acts as a switch to complete the circuit, so the hot goes in, and the back out to outlet, and the naturel goes directly to the outlet.

There really isn’t much more I can say about the wiring of this, all the information needed is in the diagram, there is more then one way to skin a cat, so just make sure your wiring is following the diagram and you’ll be fine. One thing to note, my fridge that I have plugged in the cooling outlet must draw a lot of amps, because the power switch comes with a 5 amp fuse, and when it turned on it, blew that, I had to replace it with a 10 amp fuse.

BrewPiLess Configuration

Once everything is up an running, there isn’t much left to do. Just need to set which plug is the hot and cold, and which probes are the chamber, and the beer.

Connect to your BrewPiLess via a web browser at http://brewpiless.local (or whatever you named it in the setup screen.)
Go to the Device Setup screen on the top right corner.
- Be sure to click the Erase EEPROM button at the top to be sure everything is reset.
- Click Refresh Device List on the top load all your devices.
- You have to manually select a Device slot for each probe and plug, but these are arbitrary, they just have to be unique.
- The temperature probes will have an Address value.
- Setup 4 devices:
  - Chamber Temp
  - Beer Temp
  - Chamber Heater
  - Chamber Cooler
- I am not sure if there is a better way to then trial and error to identify which is which, for the probes you can just hold in your hand and the value will change on the display. For the plugs you will need to actually set a Beer or Fridge temperature value and then one or the other will turn on.
Once your get everything setup, I would recommend backing up the configuration from the Device Setup screen incase you ever need to reload or rebuild, then you won’t have to play the guessing game on which device is which.

Extra Credit

If your like me, you are going to want to change the temperature units from C to F, because the NodeMCU has such little amount of space, there is no room for webpages to handle customization. Instead, you do it with commands:

Navigate to http://brewpiless.local/testcmd.htm
Issue this command:
- j{"tempFormat":"F"}
If your getting in the Kveik craze, and want to ferment hot AF, the you need to increase the tempSetMax value:
- j{"tempSetMax":"90.0"}

There is plenty of customizing you can do, just check out the BrewPiLess wiki: https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess/wiki

Time for a Cold One

Whew, you did it! Nice work! Go pour yourself a cold one, I know I’m going too, sorry if I missed anything, this was a pretty intense walk through. Cheers!

Taplist Pi Zero

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So, if in your homebrew life, you’ve moved on past bottling (because its it f***ing terrible) and are kegging your ferments, you’ve probably already come up with some way to label or mark your taps so you know what tap is pouring what beverage. I know there is a lot of articles out there on this topic, but, I wanted to share my experience on the matter, and hopefully, it can save you some time, and money.

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit of a tech nerd, so obviously I wanted digital signage. I mean there is several options out there to do this manually. Tap handles with black board surfaces you can write on with chalk, or even black board spray paint, you could paint on your kegerator or keezer. Or maybe make some other type of labels that hang on the taps or whatever. But I didn’t want anything like that, I wanted an actual taplist. One of the main reasons this was even remotely cost feasible for me, is I had an extra 22” LCD monitor laying around. If you have to buy a monitor to pull this off, then this walk through probably isn’t for you, but if not here is a list of things you’ll need:

The first time I did this, I used a Raspberry Pi 3, which is probably over kill for hardware to make a taplist, especially when all we are going to do is display a web page. A few months ago, I need a Raspberry Pi for another project, and when I looked to buy one, they are like $30, however, at the time, I found a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 (at the time of this writing it is ~$15). It doesn’t have near the hardware resources, but again, we are just going to be displaying a webpage. (Also, with taplist.io, you can use a kindle fire stick, I haven’t ever set it up with that, but I do know that there instructions on the product page on how to set one up.) So, lets get started.

taplist.io

The premise of this digital taplist, uses a free product (for personal use) called Taplist.io. You will need to create an account, and from there, you can create taps, build your beverage database, create kegs, attach kegs to taps. I’m not going to go into very much detail on this part because there is so many variables, and so much customization you can do with it. what ever you customize under the “Look And Feel” section of your dashboard, is what will be displayed on the final product when you are finished. The other nice part is you get an online taplist you can share with anyone (you can find mine at the bottom of this page, by clicking the “beer mug” icon).

Setting up the Raspberry Pi Zero

For the first part of this build, we need to install and configure the Raspberry Pi Zero, we will be installing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch Lite.

Download the latest img for Raspbian Stretch Lite here.
Open the Disk Utility app:
- Press CMD+SPACE to open the Spotlight application.
- In the search bar type Disk Utility.
In the top left had corner, select View, and be sure Show All Devices is selected.
Next, you will need to be sure the SD card is formated with the FAT file system.
- Select the SD drive in the left pane.
- Select Erase from the top.
- Make sure you pick FAT (MS-DOS) for the file system, and MBR (Master Boot Record) for the partition.
- THIS WILL ERASE THE ENTIRE SD CARD, SO BE SURE YOU HAVE SAVED ANYTHING YOU WANT TO EVER SEE AGAIN!
Open a terminal using the Spotlight tool (see step 2) and type Terminal.
In the terminal application, find your disk number by running diskutil list
Note your disk number, it will be in the format of /dev/disk2, it may not actually be the number 2, just look at the size of the disk and make sure its the correct one.
Unmount the disk with diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2, again, replace 2 with number of your SD card.
write the image to the SD Card with dd:
- sudo dd bs=1m if=Downloads/raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk4 conv=sync
- Replace Downloads/raspbian-stretch-lite.img with the path to the .img file you downloaded in step 1.
- Again, replace rdisk4 with the disk number you found in step 7.
- This may take some time, took my system about 10 minutes on an 8GB SD Card with a Thunderbolt SD Card Reader.

Configuring Raspbian Lite Stretch

After the img is done writing to the SD card, its time to being configuring Raspbian. Because the Raspberry Pi Zero has such little hardware, we are going to try to keep this as minimal as possible.

SSH is disabled by default, so to enable it, you need to create an empty file called ssh:
- touch /Volumes/boot/ssh
Next, you need to append dtoverlay=dwc2 to the end of /Volumes/boot/config.txt. You can do this either with textEdit or with a terminal editor.
This next step is a little tricky, first open /Volumes/boot/cmdline.txt, and located the text rootwait, immediately after that, add a space, and then this text: modules-load=dwc2,g_ether. So it should look like this:
- rootwait modules-load=dwc2,g_ether
Now go ahead and eject the SD card and then load it into the Raspberry Pi Zero and plug in the power. It will take about 60 seconds to boot up, then connect it to your computer.
Next, go to System Preferences > Network and you will see a new device called RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget. This is the Raspberry Pi Zero, you can share your internet connection to it, which will then all you to SSH to the device.
Go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable internet sharing for the RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget.
You should now beable to ssh to the Raspberry Pi Zero:
- ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
- Default password is raspberry.
- Type yes to accept the certificate thumbprint.
After you are connected, there are a few things that need to be set, run raspi-config and update the following:
- CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD else anyone can now ssh to your taplist board with the default credentials!
- Under Boot Options select Desktop/CLI and then select Console Autologin.
- Lastly configure the wifi.
You are now connected to your wifi, and can update the system:
- sudo apt-get update -y
- sudo apt-get upgrade -y
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
Now, install the minimum X Server Environment for Chromium:
- sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg x11-xserver-utils xinit openbox
- sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends chromium-browser
You need to configure the auto start commands, and to do this, you will have to use a terminal based editor, like nano or vi. I prefer nano:
- sudo nano /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart

Replace the entire contents of the file with this:

# Disable any form of screen saver / screen blanking / power management
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms

# Allow quitting the X server with CTRL-ATL-Backspace
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

# Start Chromium in kiosk mode
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/' ~/.config/chromium/'Local State'
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/; s/"exit_type":"[^"]\+"/"exit_type":"Normal"/' ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences
chromium-browser --disable-infobars --kiosk 'https://www.taplist.io/display'

You need to configure X Server to autostart and boot and load the display web page.
- nano ~/.bash_profile
- Add this to the file: [[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && startx -- -nocursor
- Save and close the file.
Lastly shut you Raspberry Pi Zero down sudo shutdown now and go attach it to your monitor. You do not need to attach any peripherals, on its next boot, it will autologin as the Pi user, and start up Chromium and navigate to https://www.taplist.io/display. The very first time this boots, there will be a code on the screen that you need to go to https://taplist.io/activate and enter in.

WHEW! Thats it, hopefully you made it this far, and ended up with something like this

Cheers!

Sources

https://brandonb.ca/raspberry-pi-zero-w-headless-setup-on-macos
https://bdking71.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/setup-an-information-kiosk-using-a-raspberry-pi-zero-w/
https://taplist.io/help/raspberry-pi-setup

Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So, my thought process on this was pretty simple, I have been reading a bit on doing an all Brettanomyces fermented NEIPA. I started reading on Milk The Funk about different strains of Brett. The Brett Claussenii strain from White Labs caught my eye. Especially based on the flavor profile:

Fruity, pineapple. Wine grape-like aroma, with light wood-like, floral, and citrus aromas. More fruit forward in the flavor, clean aftertaste with little to no “funk”.

Upon my initial research on MTF there where a few bullet points that just made an all brett NEIPA sound perfect:

Light fruit characteristics.
A longer lasting hop aroma and flavor due to Brett’s ability to constantly metabolize micro-oxygenation.
Perceived bitterness may be quite a bit lower than the same wort fermented with a clean ale yeast.

These are all things, to me, that seem to lend perfect to a NEIPA. So, I went about planing a brewday. Was looking a for a pretty simple grain bill, and I went about a hop bill based on a recent NEIPA I had from Arvon Brewing, called Jurassic Haze that was amazing. Here is my Brewfather Recipe.

I picked up some WLP 645 from my LHBS, made a starter, and based on some reading I did you want to let it spin for a bit longer then a regular starter on the stir plate. I let it go for about 6 days, then crashed it for 2 days.

On to brew day. Long story short, brew day went perfect, hit all my numbers, pH and everything. Let it cool to about 75F, as the temp range of the brett was 70F-85F. I pitched the brett, set my BrewPiLess to raise the temp from 75F to 85F over 14 days and then I started the waiting game.

Brewday Whirlpool:

Now this beer was a little pricey, the 6 gallons of wort was probably about 70-ish dollars, so I was watching pretty close to make sure fermentation took off, especially being a completely new yeast method to me. Anyway, after day 1, nothing. After day 2, nothing. No krausen, no CO2, nothing. Im starting to get worried. Well, I went back to MTF and did a bit more reading, guess what, brett C, does NOT attenuate wort well when pitched solo, like, it only attenuates 20%! Long story short, if your WLP645 fully attenuates, its contaminated with sacc, see this.

DAMNIT! FML!

So, being, the person I am, I panicked, not knowing what else to do, I decided to pitch some sacc yeast. I mean what else could I do? I really didn’t want the wort to get infected and waste all of it. So, I called my LHBS, They had some Omega Labs Tropical Ale yeast OYL-200. This is a great yeast, it was actually formally classified as a brett. Its great for both IPAs and NEIPAs, and well, its brett-ish. And it has a temp range of 70F-85F, perfection! So I pitched that in at about 52ish hours post brett C. pitch.

Within 12 hours, thing was bubbling like a tommy gun, I’m sure it helped it was at about 77F by this time. Now, I also decided to make another small change this batch, no biotransform hops. Now, incase you are not aware, at the start of the NEIPA craze, it was common practice to pitch dry hops at the peak of fermentation, about 24-72 hour in. Well, this has since been “proven” wrong and wasteful of hops as all the aroma is taken out with the CO2. So I decided to pass on this step, instead trying to dry hop closer to packaging. Well, this damn thing bubbled for almost 2.5 weeks, and dropped to 1.005 on my first hydrometer reading, then I waited another 4 days, and it was at 1.004 (which I’m calling terminal gravity), so I added 3.5oz of hops, let it sit another three days, kegged, crashed and carbed. The finished product is very good, to be honest, a little wierd, but a one of a kind. lots of pineapple, honestly a lot of funk from the brett, very fruity, surprisingly full bodied, and over all, a very solid drinker!

Tag: 3dprinting

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About

About me hmmm; where to start… well, I like beer. I like to make beer, I like to drink beer. I also like to talk about beer, and making beer.

Do you need anything more then that? Well if so, you can keep reading… Beyond beer, I am a Husband and Father. I have been in the tech game for the better part of a decade. I work primarily with Microsoft Hyper-V, the Systems Center Suite, and a lot of PowerShell. I have several published PowerShell Modules, Scripts and Functions, you can find them on the PowerShell Gallery published under the username @dotps1. I have decided to abandon the dotps1 handle. Why? Doesn’t matter and I don’t have much more to say on that at this time.

Outside of who I am, I have a few hobbies; Homebrewing (obviously), 3D Printing, Mountain Biking, and Disc Golf. Although, to be honest, with my family and a full time career, I don’t do half of those as much as I’d like, and don’t do the other half as much as a should.

I homebrew mostly on the free time I get, most brewdays are time consuming so it tends to be an entire Saturday. But, the one thing homebrewing has really opened up for me is DIY projects. Things like temperature controllers. Which got me into 3D printing so I was able to make parts at home. Which got me into 3D design, So now I’m making parts that never existed before, improving on a base model, or adding features.

I love to pedal, and its one of the few things I do to somewhat be active. I pedal single track and on the road. Although, less on the road these days because peoples eyes are on their screens and not road in front of them. If I just lived somewhere a bit warmer, I could do it all year. But until then, Ill just keep cultivating mass in the winter months.

As far as Disc Golf goes, been doing it my whole life, just need the clock to open up some time for me to do it again.

What you can you plan on finding here?

Lots of brew day experiences, most of the time, something goes wrong. Sometimes worse then others, which should lead to some interesting homebrewed tales.
Probably some of the most obscure tech experiences that you’ll ever find, with fixes that neither you, or anyone you’ll ever meet will ever need, ever.
My what I’d do different if i did it again on DIY projects, from a fully functional BrewPiLess, to a prop Iron Man Reactor and stand (The stand I had to design from scratch and it turned out quite well.)
And maybe after enough beers, some really stupid rants on things like religion, god, death, politics, social culture, and possibly even some bullshit about movies.

Still here, impressive; this has probably been the worst About page you’ve ever read, (if you’ve even made this far). Bottom line is I’m just another lost soul doing things I somewhat enjoy to make time have some meaning. I’m overly eccentric, I over think absolutely everything, I always assume the worst, but, sometimes, just sometimes, amongst all my self induced anxiety, I get to laugh a bit too, so cheers!

Tag: diy

Tag: homebrewing

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Tag: klipper

Tag: raspberrypi

[ { "title" : "Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3", "url" : "/using-bltouch-with-klipper-and-the-ender3/", "category" : "3dprinting", "tags" : "3dprinting, klipper", "date" : "2019-06-04 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "How to make your BLTouch Sensor work with the Klipper firmware and the Crealty Ender3." } , { "title" : "Klean Yer Keezer Lines", "url" : "/klean-yer-keezer-lines/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "keezer, diy, 3dprinting", "date" : "2019-05-09 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "How to easily clean and rinse your keezer beverage lines." } , { "title" : "CIP DIY Keg Washer", "url" : "/cip-diy-keg-washer/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "keezer, diy", "date" : "2019-05-07 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Clean your kegs, the easy way." } , { "title" : "PiLess BrewPi", "url" : "/piless-brewpi/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing, raspberrypi, 3dprinting", "date" : "2019-05-01 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Building a BrewPi without a Raspberry Pi using the BrewPiLess implementation." } , { "title" : "Taplist Pi Zero", "url" : "/taplist-pi-zero/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing, raspberrypi, keezer", "date" : "2019-04-26 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "A walk through for creating a digital taplist with Taplist.io and Raspberry Pi Zero." } , { "title" : "Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)", "url" : "/mixed-ferm-neipa-first-attempt/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing", "date" : "2019-04-17 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "An overview of creating a mixed fermentation NEIPA." } ]

angryMrTom

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Values You’ll Need

Get Configuring

Configure The Z Offset

Update

My Ender3 Klipper printer.cfg

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

Build It

Use It

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Sources

PiLess BrewPi

Enter the PiLess BrewPi

Shopping List

Pro Tip

Time to make the chimi-f***ing-changas

Install the BrewPiLess bin on the ESP8266 NodeMCU

Soldering

Assembly

BrewPiLess Configuration

Extra Credit

Time for a Cold One

Taplist Pi Zero

taplist.io

Setting up the Raspberry Pi Zero

Configuring Raspbian Lite Stretch

Sources

Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)

Tag: 3dprinting

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About

Tag: diy

Tag: homebrewing

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Tag: keezer

Tag: klipper

Tag: raspberrypi

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