First State Brewers Blog

Since you all are suffering my Tech Geek posts about my user interface for my planned computerized homebrew system so well, I thought I’d take it a step beyond my screenshots to a little “in action” action. The screen capture was encoded with the Microsoft MPEG-4 v2 codec, and I know it works with Windows Media Player v11 (what we have). If it turns out you guys can’t see it or play it, or really want a different codec, I can try again. Otherwise try saving it to your harddrive and opening it with WMP.

BrewzNET video #1

The video basically shows the use of design control points, resizing the various objects that are available, playing around with pipe routing and styles, and a quick demonstration of the alpha-level support, which is not 100% at this point - I make the fermenter vessel partially transparent by setting the alpha channel for one of the color properties. I used a crappy freeware video capture application, so the framerate blows… but you get what you pay for, and you guys still will get the idea on how the screen designer is gonna work.

You may not care, which is fine too.

On the homebrewing front - I haven’t really brewed much. We did a saison (10 gal) a couple weekends ago, which is ready for transfer to secondaries, and I bottled 10 gallons of Choking Sun Stout on Monday - But I haven’t really put much thought into brewing more batches, namely because I have so much beer on hand as it is. I will probably brew some Black Honey Ale and a Coffee Stout sometime soon, but no firm plans on when. To be honest, the price hikes for malt and hops have seriously got me rethinking the frequency with which I brew. I have a decent supply of base malt and hops now, so I’ll probably burn through that over the next 6 months just to reduce on-hand inventory.

So I managed to get my prototype components worked into the main application after a couple hours of playing around. I fixed several issues, and found about 20 more that need attention.

I expect that this will go on for some time - but the results should be good. As you can see, I’ve put in placeholders for a component list on the top right side, and a combobox that will display the current component and its associated icon. I will ultimately put some tabs at the top of the development area to allow flipping between the graphics screens and events designers… I need to work on getting the refresh code optimized and hiding the component properties that I don’t want to show up in the PropertyGrid too.

So much to do…. but that is a good thing, I guess.

I have been writing computer code since I was 10, pounding away on the keyboard of my dad’s Atari 800 back when BASIC came on a cartridge, and programs were stored on audio tapes. Computers and programming have always made sense to me, and I’ve been blessed with a unique capacity to discern what applications are doing. I exercise that ability every day in my job, diagnosing problems with SAP which (more often than not) are the result of users not understanding or misusing the system rather than the sytem doing something unexpected.

So why the history lesson? Because I suprised myself recently, or more specifically the power of Visual Studio 2005 suprised me. For months I have been struggling with how to implement some design environment functionality for the BrewzNET software I’ve been working on for over a year. In fact, I took a several month hiatus during July-Oct and have not written a single line of code in that time - until this week. It is amazing what happens when you walk away from something and come back to it with fresh eyes. The primary concepts I struggled with (and prompted me to walk away) were how to implement the component and property list functionality when setting up a sculpture interface - namely how to make them look similar to the VB2005 IDE, which I feel is fairly user friendly and intuitive. I could write mountains of code and build custom components to do that, but the effort involved did not seem worth it.

Fast forward to Tuesday evening, when I was bored and playing around, only to discover a standard out-of-the-box component I was not familiar with - The PropertyList. It is exactly what I needed, and is (I believe) the same component that the VS2005 studio uses. SCORE! So how hard is it to use with my already-developed display classes for pipes, tanks, labels, etc? A single line of code implemented 75% of the functionality I was looking for - and the remaining percents are due to poorly designed object design on my part (and relatively straight-forward to resolve). The result speaks for itself - a flexible and professional looking property editing list. It works very well with the control-point functionality I had already implemented, and seems to update itself automatically when properties change.

Inspired by my newfound functionality, I endeavored to unlock the secrets of the component toolbox list. A quick SPY++ look at the VS2005 component list yielded the class name of “TBToolBox”. At first that didn’t mean alot to me, and I checked for a “toolbox” component hoping for a similar eureka! moment as with the PropertyList. Alas, it did not happen. Instead, I reanalyzed the name, and realized that the “TB” at the beginning of the class name stood for “Toolbar”. Voila! 10 minutes later, I had a prototype component list that looks strikingly similar to the VS2005 one.

So with some hesitation, I declare “GAME ON!!” for my control system development again. I hope to have a screen design environment completed by the end of the year, perhaps with some of the event model code completed as well. I have a short overnight business trip to CII scheduled for early November, so I may have time to code while en-route and Thursday evening. 5 1/2 hours in the air each way to Austin - YUCK.

I’ve got a drinking problem, I know - namely the lack thereof!!! For the first time in a long time, I’ve got a surplus of beer in my basement. In fact, I’m almost at 100% utilization of my available kegs, despite having alot of beer in bottles too. Brewing big batches (10 and 20 gallons) is certainly part of the cause. Couple that with a significant drop off of visiting friends & family, and Donna and I both having allergies that have curtailed our consumption… and my basement has filled up. I wish I were in this position back in June so I could have coasted through the summer months and not struggled with hot fermentation temperatures and warm ground water that had to be chilled with ice.

We have in kegs right now:

* 2.5 gal Gnarleywine (Brewed in 2006)
* 2.5 gal Tripel (Brewed in 2006)
* 10 gal Peated Scottish (5 of which is spoken for)
* 5 gal Ginger Pale Ale
* 5 gal Travelers & Tourists Dubbel
* 5 gal Saturday IPA
* 10 gal American Brown
* 5 gal Blackberry Dunkelweizen
* 5 gal Irish Red

Which totals up to 45 gallons in kegs pending rotation through the kegerator, so I think I will be doing relatively little brewing until the end of the year… might be a nice change of pace.

I also finally got off my duff and made some tap handle labels. Only one of them am I particularly pleased with - the Saturday IPA I brewed with Brian. I hope we brew this beer again sometime in the future, but given the fact that Columbus and Simcoe hops have become incredibly scarce (and expensive!!!), I think it might be a few years until the hop growing industry recovers. Scott Bieber tried some when he and Marty were over here last Sunday, and he seemed pretty pleased with it. Marty liked the peated scottish too - he threatened running off with my keg

Also, it appears that my level sensor testing inspired a fellow brewer down in Australia. Arnie has had an automated home brewery for years, and is constantly upgrading and improving his designs. I hope one of these days I’ll be able to pull together an automated home brewery as well, but priorities have put it on hold for now. Its just as well - I still have alot of work to do on the control and user interface software. Check out Arnie’s site, as well as Aussie Homebrewers where he is a frequent contributor to the forums.

Yes, ‘How Do You Brew?’ has officially moved to their new location at the Shoppes at Louviers on 203 Louviers Drive, Newark DE, 19711 across from the Bank of America complex on Paper Mill Road. Marty Drinan and Scott Bieber were on hand representing the First State Brewers to help Joe and Marlana with the move.

Joe and Marlana have their work cut out for them as the mess you see around them needs to be cleaned up and moved to their new store!

Here, Joe is busy carrying merchandise out of the store.

Careful with that! That’s a grain mill your moving!

Every available vehicle was needed to move as much as possible in one trip!

Reality sinks in when you take down your sign!

Here’s the new store! Looks great, doesn’t it?

There is so much shelf space! Joe will now be able to stock everything he has always wanted to carry!

Marlana is busy getting that inventory plugged into the computer!

Look for the new store to be open this Saturday, October 6th!