Posts Tagged ‘software’

As some of you have no doubt sampled, we’re playing around with homebrew beer.  It’s all turned out drinkable, and some of it was downright delicious, but it’s been mostly luck.

Our beer supplies have come mostly from William’s Brewing, and although I don’t have any other datapoints, I’ve been pleased with the ingredients, equipment, and service.  The instructions are clear and straightforward, which is probably why things have turned out so well.  But there’s one thing we haven’t been following: the brewing temperature requirements.

Temperature is a major factor in the brewing process.  We’ve been brewing ales, which are relatively forgiving, but too hot or too cold can impair the yeast activities or impart strange flavors to the beer.  We’ve been leaving the beer to ferment in a cabinet in the kitchen, so that it would be in a cool dry dark place, and hopefully brew well.  But in truth, we have no idea what temperature it is in there.  Sure, I could buy a thermometer… or I could use this as an excuse to buy more microcontrollers.

The result is the “Beerbug”.  Right now, it’s an Arduino mounted in a cigar box, placed in the brewing cabinet.  It logs temperatures every five minutes and wirelessly sends it to another Arduino, which sends it over USB to a laptop computer, which uses a Python script to read the temperature data and logs it in a Google Docs spreadsheet, which then updates a line chart, which you can see at http://mattborn.net/beerbug.

The source and some of the technical how-to is on at http://github.com/mattborn/beerbug.

So remember that automation dealie, which hopefully leads to charty goodness?  Well, I’ve got a script parsing incoming emails and extracting the dates & balances as datapoints, and then writing that out to a CSV.  The CSV is a nice data format which can be imported to excel or parsed easily somewhere else, and I’ve got a PHP package which might be tweaked into making PNG or JPG format charts on demand.

But the real annoying thing is that the absolute easiest part of this whole process, isn’t.  So far two of my financial institutions have proven to be nice and easy to deal with, because I can sign up for a daily basic, plain text “what’s my balance?” email.  Two others have proven less than useful – one offers a phenomenally stupid “you have a balance.” notification and one offers a notice on deposits or withdrawals.  I suppose, given a starting balance, that would work.  I still haven’t checked a few, but I’m worried that student loan servicers aren’t concerned with easy balance notifications.