A couple of months ago, I tried my hand at home-brewing for the first time; and while the result was drinkable, it was fairly weak. As far as I can tell, the primary issue is that the first fermentation process needs to happen at a constant warm temperature (in the 21 - 27°C range) - my kitchen however, is more like 17-19°C.

I found a a neat product called a brew belt designed for exactly such a scenario. Depending on the outside temperature, you place the belt on your fermentation vessel at different heights to ensure it warms it the right amount. Trouble is, that my kitchen isn‘t always a certain temperature … and I didn’t really want to keep checking the temperature and moving the belt. If only there was a way of switching the belt on and off depending on the actual temperature of the brew…

Inspired by the (vastly more elaborate) brewpi project, I've rigged up an arduino, connected to a wired thermometer which can (safely) swich the brew belt on or off depending on the temperature of the brew.

Building on Hacklet #12, adding a waterproofed version of the DS18B20 one wire thermometer using this handy tutorial and connecting a cheap Maplins remote controlled mains switch and a tutorial for hacking that, I now have myself an automatic brew temperature switch.

Using the RC switch means that the mains power is completely isolated from the arduino etc.

So, all that remains is to test out how well it works!

Read on for the arduino code …

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A very quick update to Robobear MkII, just because the last code example for the bear was so horrible; here's an OOP version.

Based on this tutorial for getting a rotary encoder working with arduino, and this old LCD library, we now have a method for adjusting numerical data up/down using the rotary encoder, and displaying that data on the LCD screen.

Hmmm, I wonder what we could use that for…?!

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I combined this tutorial and this one, to create a simple arduino based sensor which reports the temperature to a bluetooth 4.0 enabled mobile phone (in this case iPhone 5).

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In this iteration, RoboBear has had the Arduino microcontroller replaced with Raspberry Pi and an Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver. There are several advantages to this setup; not least, is that I can control the bear using bluetooth or wifi (via SSH or HTTP), and therefore can hook him up to web services! For now though, he's just running a simple loop.

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After a work related hiatus in February from doing hacklets, we're back with the first for March, and its a good start to the month.

Without further ado, I give you RoboBear (Mk I):-

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This one's not really a hacklet, because I just followed the instructions in this post:
Nintendo Wii Remote, Python and The Raspberry Pi. Still it'll probably find its way into a hacklet soon! Check out the post for how to get the WiiMote / RPi working together with Python.

On the back of the iPyPiDrum and PS2 dualshock controller with Raspberry Pi plus Python hacklets, I thought it'd be fun to apply exactly the same code from the iPyPiDrum, but using the dualshock controller to control an iOS game.

Rather than writing one for this demo, I based the hacklet off the How to Make a Platform Game Like Super Mario Brothers – Part 2 tutorial on the ever excellent RayWenderlich.com.

On the iOS we've just replaced the sound playback code from iPyPiDrum with method calls that replace the touch events in the Koalio game.

After the success of getting the Raspberry Pi to mediate between the Taiko no Tatsujin controller and sound playback, this hacklet is trying to push that one step further by forwarding all drum hits on to an iPad.

So where to start? First up, I needed socket server, after messing about for good few hours with “Twisted”, I hit upon this tutorial / script - Asynchronous socket server in python.

With a little hacking (gist at end of the post), I was able to get button data sent over sockets to initially telnet clients.

telnet 192.168.0.22 12345

Next issue, sockets on iOS; as is often the case, Ray Wenderlich provided the answer How To Create A Socket Based iPhone App and Server.

Once I had data flowing from the socket server to iOS I found that the data was getting corrupted somehow. Adding …

.encode("utf-8")

… to what was being sent fixed that issue.

A bit of iOS hacking and we have our iPyPiDrum!

So, taken me a few days to get the time to record the video, but here is the next installment!

The reason for working with the PS2 dualshock controller was, apart from some intriguing possibilities with connecting games controllers to iOS games / apps, was to try getting the Taiko no Tatsujin controller to work with iPad. I loved the arcade version of this game and was almost tempted to buy a Japanese or American PS2 specifically for this game (stupid region locks).

Again using USB Overdrive, I was able to confirm that the TnT controller worked in exactly the same way as the dualshock controller and therefore would work with the RPi in exactly the same way.

So using exactly the same python program as for the dualshock comtroller - we have ourselves a drum pad!

Obviously there is loads of latency, but it proves the concept!