KegBB

So, I have been thinking of building a kegbot for a while and found your site to be awesome! One thought I had, though, is I would like to have the kegbot a "stand-alone' device. So... I was thinking of using an Arduino Mega (for the additional interrupts) and coupling it with a touch screen LCD/OLED display. This way the display could show the stats as well as some nice little logo of the beer on tap. The touch screen would allow me do do all of the config from a noce sexy box on top of the 'rator. Anyone thought of this or tried it?

Edited billprozac (Jan. 15, 2010 16:33:55)

billprozac
I would like to have the kegbot a "stand-alone' device. So... I was thinking of using an Arduino Mega (for the additional interrupts) and coupling it with a touch screen LCD/OLED display. This way the display could show the stats as well as some nice little logo of the beer on tap. The touch screen would allow me do do all of the config from a noce sexy box on top of the 'rator. Anyone thought of this or tried it?

Hi Bill! -- Not too crazy at all. As you can probably tell, the kegbot/kegboard design has been "online" from the get-go (assumes a host computer/connection). My philosophy has been that the kegboard should stick to the essentials, and let a host do the other stuff. Especially when you think about features like logging all drinks, user management, and hooking into twitter/iphone/etc, a host quickly becomes essential.

You may also find yourself coming up with all sorts of ideas for extra things to add to your setup -- extra displays, reporting your stats to the web, hooking in additional kegerators, etc. Those are things the 'central-manager' design of the current kegbot sw are designed to support.

One other option you might consider. There are several <$100 embedded products from linksys, d-link, and others that have a network connection and a USB port. These can run OpenWRT (a free linux distro), making them perfectly capable choices for the 'host' PC. So your setup can still be small and sexy

All that said, there are definitely some features that could make the kegboard better/useful in standalone mode (if limited in feature set), so I'm curious to hear more of your requirements. I recently added some LCD support to the kegboard firmware and would like to expand it.

Finally, you might want to check out moo's design, which I believe is more in keeping with a standalone architecture: http://vachementcool.com/MooSpace/Blog/Entries/2009/11/1_I_built_a_Kegbot.html

welcome aboard
mike

Edited mike (Jan. 15, 2010 17:28:35)