iSpindel Project – Post 1

It’s been said that the cold side of making beer is the most important aspect of homebrewing. That means that keeping a close eye on the fermentation process could have a significant impact on the quality of your beer. 

Traditional methods of monitoring your fermentation usually only involve the appearance of the beer, if fermenting in glass or clear plastic, or the bubbles coming from the airlock or blowoff tube.

When the Tilt Hydrometer was released, a whole new world was opened to homebrewers who’d like to get real time data about their fermentation process. The ability to keep an eye on temperature and gravity as the fermentation progresses can give the homebrewer far more information than they ever had before. But at $135 a piece, this means that the cost of that information might be out of reach of the typical homebrewer. 

Enter the iSpindel project out of Germany. An open source version of the popular electronic hydrometer. Needless to say, when a friend of mine told me that this project existed, I could not help myself but dig in deep. My background in electronics, programming, and brewing, made it a no brainer that this should become a project I plant my flag on. 

As we dig into this project further to come up with a more solid and consistent product we will continue to post our findings on this website so that others might learn from us and build an iSpindel of their own.

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2 Comments

  1. Hi Chris. The switches you have linked in your parts list for the iSpindle, do they fit the PCB holes?

    Regards
    Scott

    1. Come to think of it, there’s a good chance that they won’t fit. But you can fold them and surface mount solder them.

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