Non Laser project

[araugh]

For those that haven't met me, this is Adam from X-Laser. It's pretty awesome to get to do stuff with laser projectors all the time and I love doing it, but to be honest it means that in my free time I'm not really looking to work with lasers for personal projects. I always have to be making something, so here's the latest for any interested.

My friend Joe and I built a kegerator in a day a few years ago from a cheap used chest freezer. It worked beautifully for 3 years, but it was ugly and there were always things we wanted to change about it. Well after much planning, drafting and a little programming, we have finished the new one.

http://imgur.com/a/7VJ6a#0

This project was a lot of fun. The short version is that there are two taps for now, one in the garage and one that leaves the freezer and goes up to his kitchen wall. There's an airbox in there designed to circulate cold air through the remote tap lines and keep air moving in the freezer. We knocked together a little electronics box for temperature feedback and controlling/reading fan speed. For now it's just a few sensors, an arduino and a pot. In the future once we figure out what we want the final configuration to be we'll do it right with a small board that will just fit on the back of the LCD. First step now that it's all functional is to replace the pot with a rotary encoder/button to that we can navigate menus and such and probably get this thing web enabled.

Here's the before and after, plenty of process pics and explanations at the link.

[buffo]

Nice work, Adam! I love the idea of actually chilling the line that runs from the keg up to the tap!

I've seen a few kegerators back home when I was younger, but they all had the tap mounted right on top, so there was no need for the extra tubing (and thus no need to cool it). The downside, of course, is you have this ugly appliance taking up valuable space in your man-cave. I like your solution better.

ADam

[araugh]

Thanks Adam, I appreciate the kind words. This was a bit of a refinement of our first iteration of the system which honestly worked great for 3 years and the only reason we redid all this was because the old freezer compressor died. With the previous system we had 3 degrees of temperature drop between the freezer and tap as long as the ambient temperature was above 39 degrees F. As this system stands now, we've had a couple days with ambient temps in the 90's in his garage and we have only had a 0.4F drop on average at the tap. On days 80 and below we have no drop. Perfect pours even if the beer sits in the line for a day or two.

[macpod]

Nice job,

If you like building stuff, you should check out the baltimore hackerspace. We have at least one person who brews their own beer. There last batch was pretty crazy it involved redbull, caffieen, and antihistimines or something

I think I'm the only person doing laser stuff there so you would only have to deal with one laser fool

[araugh]

Just one laser guy there huh? I bet we can take care of that.