Water level with the BCS - A how-to

Suggestions, Problems, Availability, etc. Everything is up for discussion.
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bbrally
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Re: Water level with the BCS - A how-to

Post by bbrally »

The problem I've had was with the sensitivity of the BCS reading resistances. If you look at the calibrate sensor page in the BCS and watch the resistance values of probes hooked up to the system, the resistance can routinely bounce around 50 ohms with the occasional spike to 100 ohms. I thought this just might be my system with it's mess of wires, but the BCS demo Adam has setup does the same thing (http://ecc.webhop.org:8081/thermo.html)

I don't know if this is noise in the BCS or noise being picked up from the probe and wires.

What I wanted to do was disconnect everything from the BCS and then only hook up a single resistor to the BCS and watch its resistance to see how much noise there was. I thought this would give an indication of whether the noise was internal or external to the BCS.

The bottom line is that the resistance needs to jump around less than the difference in resistances you are trying to measure.
AtomicGecko
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Re: Water level with the BCS - A how-to

Post by AtomicGecko »

bbrally...your post is brilliant! Been hunting all over the web on how to do this and have not found a solution as elegant as yours. :D
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Re: Water level with the BCS - A how-to

Post by AtomicGecko »

What do you think about using load cells to measure volume? In an all electric setup the load cells could be the "feet" on your vessel. Taking the voltage out using a wheatstone bridge and running it through an amplifier then and then "The Arduino reads this as a voltage"..."and converts that to a number and then transmitted to a digital potentiometer to set a resistance" thant the BCS could use.

I was looking at the uses for a load cell on Sparkfun web site... (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ge ... 1437960926)
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bbrally
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Re: Water level with the BCS - A how-to

Post by bbrally »

I have a gas fired brewery and as such never spent any time on this option. But I feel it would be fairly easy to do. One thought though is how much effect heat would have on the accuracy of the load cells, and if the load cells could be thermally isolated enough if heat would be an issue.

Personally, I believe JonW's method of timing water through a fixed orifice is a much simpler method.

http://forum.embeddedcc.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2603
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