This brewing system is part of top three designs for Freescale Make It Challenge: Kinetis MCUs. The two other designs are an Automobile Collision Detector and a “Swiss Army Knife” for the Blind .
This design utilizes Freescale’s Kinetis K60 Tower System with MK64M512 Cortex M4 MCU and FreeRTOS operating system. This could become a beer brewing appliance with the target market being home brewers and small brewpubs and restaurants. Matthew Pratt (the one who design this system) says current hone brewing systems sell for about 10,000 USD.
The sweet wort production process can be labor-intensive, requiring precise control of temperatures and transition times (It takes 4 to 5 hours for 5 gallons of beer). The Kinetis Beer Brewing System automates the process from the initial filling of water to the beer being ready to be cooled and yeast added. The user only needs to add the ingredients, malt and hops, and download the recipe via the network to the system.
The “brewbot” software has a simple user interface displayed on a 3.2″ resistive touch screen panel where you can select 4 operations: Settings, Brew Start,Brew Resume and Diagnostics. I could not find more technical details about the system.
This is not Matthew Pratt first beer brewing system design. He used a Renesas chip previously without LCD panel but instead a web interface to control and monitor the system. See http://zizzle-brewbot.blogspot.com/ for (some) details.
Watch the Freescale Kinetis Beer Brewing System in action below.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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