As of this time, I can confidently say that I am on track for an official first release before the end of 2023. But, as my luck always has it, I’ve been held up by waiting for parts because I don’t seem to know how to avoid ordering things on Amazon that ship from Shanghai. So, at this time I can’t move forward on completing the function for the hydrometer that converts changes in the reference weight to distillate ABV for the new 1 KG load cell that I recently switched to.
Against my wishes, I was forced to redesign the flow sensor to actually use moving parts. No matter how narrow I made the beam of light in the optical sensor, it would still miss drops of distillate passing through. So now it uses a small paddle wheel that interrupts the beam and it doesn’t miss a drop anymore.
The main hangup that I’m dealing with right now is waiting on supplies to make a new parrot cup out of a stainless steel espresso cup and a copper tube for the overflow. If you saw my Q&A #2 video, I showed what happens to acrylic when it comes in contact with ethanol. I’m actually waiting on solder and flux to show up because it’s coming from Shanghai.
As of this time, I have 3 people who have been brave enough to jump the gun and start building systems even though I strongly advised against it. So that makes 5 of these things in operation right now, even though the code changes daily and has features that still don’t completely work yet. On the bright side, the other 3 are in use on much larger custom built stills, and the controller system works equally as accurate as the two T-500 stills that the project initially started on.
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