An upgraded wine storage system
This is post #8 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. When I put the temperature probe into the bottle, I set it up as a nested control loop system where the bottle temperature would regulate the desired air temperature in the cabinet and then the cooler would be regulated …
Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #8: Adding Open-Loop Control’ »
This is post #7 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. If you’ve followed the story so far, you know that it’s kind of been a bumpy road, especially once the ICs started burning out… But at this point we have a basically functioning unit. Now the question is how …
Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #7: Final tuning’ »
This is post #6 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. Time to start testing things. I had managed to burn the Arduino bootloader onto the Atmega 328, and I had previously written some test code to exercise the front panel LED display. The big thing to test now was …
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This is post #5 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. By now, most of the electronics are done, but some hardware work remains: The cabinet needs to be drilled up to fit the temperature probes, and 4 conductors need to be put through to the lamp area for the …
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This is post #4 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. If you’re read the previous posts, you have an idea of what functionality I have in mind. What remains to be made is the main circuit board that will house the microcontroller and the driver circuits for the thermoelectric …
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This is post #3 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. In the ceiling of the cabinet interior was a “lamp”, meaning a single white LED, controllable with one of the front panel buttons. It didn’t really provide enough light to be useful, but it was already wired to the …
Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #3: The Lamp Panel’ »
This is post #2 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. The first thing that needed figuring out was how to redo the front panel. In the original setup, this is actually where the microcontroller is located, but that wouldn’t work for the redesign because there are only 3 wires …
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Lately, I’ve been working on a wine storage unit. This is the first post in a series detailing what I’m doing. When Chris Hayward left town for Heidelberg, he bequeathed his (non-functional) wine refrigerator to me. It didn’t work, but I figured it would probably be something simple that could be fixed. Kathy and I …
Continue reading ‘The High-performance Wine Storage System: introduction’ »