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Brewmatic – Design
I present Brewmatic: a compact, mobile, electric, fully digital, internet connected, voice enabled, 3-stage home brewery. To read about the motivations behind the beautiful machine, read Brewmatic – Introduction and Problem Statement. Requirements The simplified must-haves for Brewmatic: High Level Design Brewmatic uses of off-the-shelf components where feasible. In favor of panel mounted PID controllers, as often used in electric breweries, a microcontroller is used with bespoke firmware to reduce cost and space. As a full description of each component would require its own post, a summary of each follows below. Hardware Components are mounted on a standard food service wire shelving cart. The first shelf provides storage for parts,…
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Brewmatic – Introduction and Problem Statement
Beer and I go back a long way. Much of my early relationship with beer revolved around the cheapest and easiest to obtain lager. After graduating from computer engineering and attaining professional employment, I finally found myself with a disposable income. I soon came to think of Heineken as a sort of luxury brand, even a status symbol, since it cost a buck more than the other swill at the bar. It only tasted a little different than the other common options, when it wasn’t skunked. I can’t exactly remember when I discovered ales, but I do recall thinking they were the beer equivalent of Thai food. Ales have so…
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Wired Recommends Woosh!
For the past three years I’ve led the engineering team at Woosh Air. It was an incredibly long road to take the product from concept to production. Filled with pot holes, speed bumps and the occasional wreck. I’ve been reading Wired since it was first published in 1993 and consider it the most reputable review of consumer products, especially tech. So it was both an incredible and timely gift when they recommended the Woosh Smart Air Filter in their review published on Christmas Eve, 2024. Julian Chokkattu did a fantastic job explaining the product. Read it in full here: Review: Woosh Smart Air Filter
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Building a CAN Bus Sniffer
I needed a way to sniff the interior CAN bus of my Jeep Wrangler to debug my audio problems. After some internet sleuthing I can across these sites: Hacking the CAN-Interior Bus on jeepforum.com Hacking the Jeep Interior CAN-Bus on chadgibbons.com It was apparent that I could build a sniffer, though it would cost a few bucks. Copperhill Technologies sells a CAN bus interface and enclosure for the RaspberryPi 3. I was already familiar with the Pi having done some work on a Pi Zero so I bought them both along with a new Pi 3B. CAN bus interface Enclosure Raspbeery Pi 3 Model B The nice thing about this…
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Fun with CAN Bus
With the Seicane installed I wasn’t sure the Jeep’s subwoofer was working anymore. The sound was very thin compared to the factory unit. I did an A/B test between the two using my phone as the source and could hear a huge difference. Why doesn’t the sub work? 2015-2017 Wranglers with the Alpine premium audio package have an amplifier that’s controlled by messages sent from the head unit over a CAN bus. The stereo communicates this way to control: gain, fade, balance and the bass/mid/treble frequency equalizer. The Seicane unit itself doesn’t communicate on the CAN bus directly, it uses a separate box to decode messages and then transmits them to…
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Debugging Seicane’s 7.1.2 Android Car Stereo
In my last post I briefly explained how I swapped out the factory stereo in my Jeep with 10.1″ touchscreen from Seicane. After a lot of struggling I managed to install the damn thing but, of course, it didn’t work 100% as advertised either (it is from China). Problems right out of the box: Left and right channels were swapped. Subwoofer didn’t seem to be working. A loud and annoying hum with the engine on. Voice and call steering wheel buttons no longer functioned. Terrible GPS performance, Google Maps was unusable, even with the antenna on top of the instrument cluster. Swapped L/R Channels I figured this out when playing…
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Swapping the Useless Factory Stereo in a 2017 Jeep Wrangler
The very first mod I did to my brand new 2017 Jeep Wrangler was to upgrade the terrible factory stereo. I swapped it for a 10.1″ Android touch screen system. Before: After: I bought a “Seicane” Android 7.1.2 head unit from seicane.com. No, it wasn’t easy and several features don’t work as promised but overall it just about does everything it’s supposed to. Over the coming days and weeks I’ll document as much as I can about what I learned so others may leverage my experiences. It came in about a week from somewhere deep inside China which was impressive, albeit costly ($130 CAD for shipping). Installation was supposed to…