“I came back to Australia in 2016 after some years living in Thailand and I couldn’t believe the price of a carton of beer, around $50.
So I set up my own brewery again, this time using kegs instead of bottles. No secondary fermentation, no time-consuming washing and sterilizing bottles, and most importantly, no waiting for 3 weeks.
I converted an old fridge for the purpose with 2 kegs each holding 23 liters and 2 taps on the door. I had a D size bottle of CO2 (from BOC) to carbonate the beer at the side of the fridge. This ran to a 2 way manifold to supply each keg separately.
This was great, I could just carbonate overnight at 40psi and the beer was ready the next day.
One problem I had was when the keg became empty, without notice, arrrggg no beer!!
So I decided to make some scales to fit under the kegs to weigh the beer and display it as liters so I would know what quantity of beer I had remaining in each keg.
This project is fairly simple using readily available parts on eBay or AliExpress.
I designed a case for the display that sits on the fridge, it has a bracket to screw to the door (I have yet to do).
The scales that go under the kegs are made from 19mm thick plywood and were milled on my CNC machine.(could be 3D printed, I have included STL files)
I have included STL files for all the parts of the display case for 3D printing.
I made a Veroboard PCB assembly for the screen and brightness pot.
I made Vero board PCB’s for both scales.
are a few useful links:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Bathroom-…
https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/11946/…
https://github.com/bogde/HX711 for the HX711 load cell library
https://github.com/arduino-libraries/LiquidCrystal for the LCD library
Supplies:
Veroboard
Arduino Nano
2004 LCD display
10k pot and knob
10k trimpot
2 x kits of 4 x 50kg load cells with HX711 boards
4 x 10mm M3 Male/Female Spacer
4 x M3 nuts
4 x M3x6 CSK screws
16 x Screw Terminal Blocks
2 x 10 way IDE ribbon cable sockets PCB mount
2 x 10 way IDE ribbon cable sockets cable mount
1.5 meters of 10 way ribbon cable
USB socket PCB mount
Short USB cable
22-24g instrument wire
12VDC plug pack”