I have put together a Kegberry system with an arduino kegboard and flowmeter. I can see stats and pour info by logging in from another computer on the same network as well as over the internet. I have to manually adjust who belongs to what pours, I can’t seem to get the untapped portion working properly, and I get lots of duplicate pours. (BTW, we had lots of ghost pours happening on this system until we added a capacitor from pin 2 to ground, haven’t had one since.)
If I connect the arduino to a tablet and connect to the kegberry server over the local network, will this cure these kind of problems, or is there likely something else wrong?
I suspect I should have a tablet just for the sake of making the interface easier to use.
I am pretty new at this (networking and servers, not drinking beer), so any help would be appreciated.
Are you expecting the tablet to help with the ghost pours or with the attaching names to pours? It’s very nice to have a tablet just because the UI is nice and because it allows users to take pictures and associate pours, but otherwise, it seems pretty clear you don’t need one.
Curious what kind of capacitor you grounded to pin 2 - why did you expect that to work and why did it? I’ve got 3 kegbot boards and only one has ghost pours - not sure if it’s a defective board, flowmeter, or something else entirely but it sure would be nice to get rid of that issue.
I also have issues with ghost pours when my CO2 starts running low, so I would love to hear more about this capacitor solution. Does it just help absorb weak signals? And which pin 2 is this, pin 2 on the coaster?
Im using an Arduino UNO board connected to RasPi via USB. I am having problems with duplicate pours where I will get an exact replica of a pour once or twice after the initial pour. When this happens the volume and the timestamp are exact duplicates of the original. I was thinking that maybe the Pi, operating as both server and interface of sorts, was a bit too much. And that a tablet would likely reduce the requierements on the Pi a bit. Just not sure if i’m on the right track. I got hold of a Nexus 7 and am in the process of getting it set-up.
As for the capacitor, I don’t recall exactly what the value is but it was somewhere around the 47uF region.
The Fridge(compressor) was definitely the noise source. When the compressor starts up it creates a strong signal at around 500Hz (internet).
The frequency of the signal from our flow sensor during a pour is about 25Hz.
So we just played around with a few values, trying to find something that would block anything above, say 200Hz.
If the value is too high, it won’t block the noise. If it is too low it will stop the pulses all together and won’t register anything.
Our trouble with ghost pours was due to EMF from the compressor. So we placed a capacitor from pin 2 to ground on the arduino uno acting as the keg board. The capacitor from signal line to ground acts as a shunt for higher frequencies. This allowed us to remove the offending signal and only see the flow sensor signal at the arduino. Your problem seems more like the flow meter is becomming erratic due to pressure issues. Unfortunately, a capacitor would not likely help in that case.