The second version of the Boilermaker source code has been officially released. This version brings with it some highly requested features and a number of enhancements that improve the overall operation and code efficiency. For those of you who purchased assembled and tested units and aren’t comfortable flashing the new firmware, you can contact me for an ordering link to send your ESP32 chip to me to have it updated & returned to you.
Numerous requests were made for a third operation mode that caters to beer brewers and fermentation temperature management, so PID controller functionality has been added to a third mode. This uses the QuickPID library that was originally released for Arduino back in January of 2021 and has been enhanced by other developers since then. This has passed every test with flying colors and maintains a +/- 1C target range of any temperature with ease.
Another feature that has been highly requested is the progressive temperature feature used in Mode 3 of the Airhead upgrade for Air Stills. This can increase the temperature after the target has been reached, from 1C to 50C over the course of 1 to 24 hours. However, unlike the Airhead, the Boilermaker will continue to run after this progression has completed since the Airhead uses this feature to perform hands-free distillation runs with a tiny 1 gallon still.
Unlike the Airhead, the low speed PWM no longer bottoms out at 10%. It will now go as far down as 1% since this was needed for the PID controller. Numerous Web UI and Web API enhancements and corrections have been made since certain settings were possible to change during an active run which broke the correct operation of things. On the bright side, even with the new features and code optimizations, I’m still sitting at 25% free code space on the ESP32.
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