GF Connect v0.5 Released

I have now added full brew session support to GF Connect for Node RED running on Raspberry Pi.

This means that you can download a Batch JSON file from Brewfather, load this into GF Connect and directly start the brewing session on the Grainfather controller.

In order to start a brew session you first need to establish a connection between the Grainfather controller and GF Connect. Then you navigate to the Brewfather File upload panel and upload the batch json file you have previously downloaded from the Brewfather brew planner website.

Once you click the “Upload” button, the recipe will be sent to the Grainfather controller and you can start brewing. You will be able to control the brew session from the GF Connect dashboard and from the Grainfather controller.

The following Brewfather recipe features are supported:

• Display of mash and sparge water volumes during the brew session
• Multiple mash steps
• Control of boil time
• Alerts and displays of boil additions
• Hop stand timer

If you have a Pushover account you are also able to receive push notifications during the brew about important steps:

• Water temperature alerts for mash and boil
• Mash completion
• Adding of boil additions
• Boil and hop stand completions

You can find a description on how to configure Pushover in this previous post.

Installing GF Connect

For details about how to install Node RED and the required other components, please refer to this previous post.

If you already have the required components installed you can just grab the flow.json file from the Github repository clausbroch/node-red-gfconnect

If is also possible to clone the repository directly into Node Red as a new project. First navigate to the Projects -> New menu in Node RED:

Then select the option to Clone Repository and enter the project name and Git repository URL:

Once successfully cloned, you can access the GF Connect from http://pi:1880/ui/ where pi is either hostname or the ip address of your Raspberry Pi.

Happy brewing !

Upcoming Features

Even though you can do a full brew session on the current release, there are still a couple of features that I plan on implementing in the near future:

• Delayed session support
• Sparge water counter
• Tighter integration with Brewfather
• …and a few more

I’ll make sure to keep you posted on the progress. In the meantime I would love to hear your comments or suggestions below.