First State Brewers Blog

I can’t say that I’ve been really busy this memorial day, but I have gotten some stuff done. Probably the biggest thing was brewing 10 gallons of Witbier, at least half of which will go on to become Mango Mama” witbier (a fruit witbier with… uh… mangos). The brew day went resonably well, although I did stick the sparge pretty good after about 3 gallons. More hot liquor, a good stirring, and a second vorlauf later it sparged flawlessly.

I also am getting activities queued up for next weekend, when I will brew 10 gallons of belgian pale with - Wyeast’s Canadian Belgian Strain!!! WOOOT! I stopped by Joe & Marlana’s shop (HDYB) on Saturday, only to discover that they had another (expired) package of this stuff in the fridge. Since I do starters, that didn’t slow me down one bit - I was so thrilled to get another pure culture of that strain. I brought it home, smacked it, and within 16 hours the package had started to swell. It is now downstairs on the stirplate propogating to a good sized volume for next weekend. I will then take the slurry from my 10 gallon batch and use it for 20 gallons of Travellers & Tourists Belgian Red in a few more weeks. YEAH!!! Next time that strain becomes available, I will probably get 2 or 3 of them - LOVE that yeast.

I have also been doing some work on the user interface program for the sculpture… but you all are probably not terribly interested in that. I’ve been trying to zero in on what the design behavior would be like for setting the screens up, etc… and I think I’ve arrived at a fairly user-friendly method. It will be mostly drag & drop, with many of the properties being set by simple mouse clicks. I’ve got the drag & drop working, and have the point control working pretty well for a number of different things. The drag and drop turned out really nice - I managed to get the images to show up partially transparent - looks much cooler than the “outline” style. Right now I’ve got control point manipulations drawing just the outline because it started to look a little jumbled with the translucent style. Screenshots are below.

My hope is that this stuff can be used as a development platform by other folks who want to do something similar for their sculptures - they won’t have to struggle as much creating the user interface and can focus in on all the more fun stuff, like the electronics and piping.

…I get time to work on my .NET application for the homebrew sculpture. This weekend Donna’s headed to Atlanta to spend mother’s day with her family, and I am taking today off work to watch the kids (and for the rest of the weekend). I am actually pretty excited about it - Once the children go to bed, I can now work on my program without feeling guilty that I’m not spending quality time with Donna. I also thought I would have 4 hours a week to devote to this activity while Donna was taking Pipe Welding courses at Delaware Tech, however they cancelled the course on her due to lack of participants!! We’re trying to find other ways for her to practice TIG welding so her skills don’t get rusty.

So slowly I’ve been building up the infrastructure for my application. I could probably have expedited development if I had used cut & paste coding methods or a number of dirty tricks that I’ve learned over the years, but an important aspect of this project for me is actually learning the VB.NET language and becoming proficient in it. I spent enough time on the Visual Basic Forum answering questions on VB6 to know that people who don’t really struggle to learn something and have other people answer all their questions never retain the knowledge offered… So here I am, a newbie at coding again in a familiar (but very different) language.

You probably don’t see much in the way of progress looking at the screens, so let me enumerate exactly what has been done:

• Additon of a ValveRendererc class, which still needs some work.
• Addition of “bump up” and “bump down” styles for the unions on a pipe
• Addition of a “rounded end” style for pipes
• A “T” and “4-way” junction style for internal pipe unions in the PipeRenderer class
• A completely back-buffered ComponentDisplay control that makes rendering and updating the displayed things a breeze.
• Update event code in all renderers that notify the application when redraws are required
• A means to save and restore the component information to a file

And believe it or not, that took quite some time… Worse yet, when I was going through the changes to the PipeRenderer class I felt compelled to completely rewrite if from scratch AGAIN and had to stop myself. I may still ultimately do that, but for now I’ve got too many other things to obsess on.

This weekend I hope to start work on:

• The event model for dynamically changing component properties based on other component properties (ex. Pump1 gets turned “On”, so Pipe1 and 2 show themselves as liquid-full).
• A drag & drop screen designer so building the component collections / screens is greatly simplified
• Actual application windows that will be used in the final program, instead of just test windows.

Time will get away from me before I can complete all those things, but I’m going to try to get as much done as I can. I also still need to set up a test circuit for my MPX5010GSX pressure sensors and confirm they will measure liquid level with the kind of accuracy I am looking for. What will be really cool is if I have something to demo at Friday’s club meeting here - but I doubt that will happen.

…and a snip snip there… Boys and girls, the operative words here are are “elective sterilization”… and I’m not talking fermenters or autoclaves. I have not done any brewing related anything in a week or so due to a procedure I had last friday. It went fine, and my equipment is recovering just fine.

In the meantime, I’ve had some time of to work on my VB.NET stuff… and made progress, albeit not as much as I’d hope for nor as much as is needed, however sitting with a roasty laptop ontop of your injured… lap… is not exactly a great idea either. Where is that friggin ice!??!?! All I can say is that I am working on it as time allows and that I hope to have something to share in a few weeks.

Other things of note include:

• Jolly Pumpkin Beers are a nightmare to this brewer
• Joe Gallo, homebrewed beer guru extrordinaire

I just hope that Rob did as thorough *cough cough* a job capturing Joe’s comments as he did ours, because there is some questionable info and guidance in this latest installment, IMO… but I’m an unrepentant homebrewing snob.

And hey… that Amarillo Pale Ale recipe looks kinda familiar!!!