Home Brewer Makes a Digital Tap List Using Raspberry Pi

Micah Maziar/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The greenest way to drink beer is to brew it and consume it in your own home. For those of you considering or just getting started on home brewing, here's how to get hopping even in a small apartment kitchen. But if you've already mastered the art and want a geeky way to keep track of what's on tap in your home, a first-time tinkerer going by the name SchrodingersDrunk on Reddit has rigged up this cool digital tap list display using our favorite DIY platform, Raspberry Pi, and a 19" Samsung monitor.

Wired reports:

The project got started when the mysterious brewmeister and his roommate decided, over a few beers, to turn up the heat on their alcohol production. One would build a proper kegerator, while the other would develop a tablet interface to keep track of what was on tap. Their stopgap solution had been a simple whiteboard, but the duo was intrigued by the notion of interactivity. “We’d seen digital tap displays in a couple bars.... We figured that would be nearing overkill (read: the perfect solution for us) and didn’t really look back,” he writes.
The only problem was Schrodinger, an English major in college, didn’t have any real experience with electronics or software. “My lowest grade in college was the one computer science course I took, so the mere fact that I’ve cobbled together enough to code to have something that works is a small miracle,” he explains.

Not necessarily a miracle, but a great testament to how the Raspberry Pi has made makers out of novices and experts alike. With no previous experience, Schrodinger pieced together his creation, called Kegerface, by relying on online tutorials and communities that helped him fix issues as they came up.

On Reddit, he says about the project, "More or less, Kegerface is a thrown-together php page (I am not a programmer by any measure) that reads from a shared Google Spreadsheet and then displays the information all nice. The interface part of Kegerface is still a work in progress. The goal is to be able to click on a beer and get the recipe and tasting notes, but I am still trying to find a way to display the information that looks good and plays nice with the pi."