Beer Brewery - distributing FreeBSD + software

H

hennesse

This might not be the right forum for this question. I’m not sure if there is a right forum.

I’m developing software on FreeBSD for an advanced home beer brewery, and I might want to sell the software in the future. But how can I distribute it?

The target customer would have a spare Windows PC, but would not have much computer knowledge. Installing FreeBSD would be way too complicated for the target customer to do.

I would like to create an "image" of my disk drive on a CD along with an "installer" program. The user would boot his spare PC from the CD, and the "installer" program would:

a) format the user’s disk drive for FreeBSD
b) copy the "image" onto the user’s disk drive

At this point, I’m just looking at the feasibility of doing this. An alternative would be to sell disk drives already prepped with my "image", but this involves extra expense and hassle. I’d much rather just sell CDs.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Dave

The Electronic Brewery - http://www.davehennessey.com/brewery/photos/
 
Or you could distribute it with flash, or flash image.
I suppose you're system wouldn't be Too big, so perhaps system could run entirely from flash?

CD/DVD is also good choice
 
Thanks everyone,

You've given me a lot to think about.

The virtual appliance is probably the cleanest way to go, but it requires a fairly modern computer system.

My pilot brewery uses the physical vessel and plumbing setup from http://www.theElectricBrewery.com. But thence I diverged. I did most of my process control in software rather than hardware. Why buy two $300 PID temperature controllers (Proportional, Integral, Derivative) when I can just write the software to do the job?

My development system is an old "closet computer" - a 1.2gHz Pentium that had Windows ME on it until ME corrupted itself. But it has plenty of power to do the job under FreeBSD!

This "recycling strategy" is a selling point for homebrewers, who are "hobbyists", and notoriously cheap.

VMware or other virtual appliances would be the way to go if we were dealing with known-good newer computers. But $600 for a new computer negates any savings offered by my software-based system.

So I'm going to follow LiveCD, even though it might lead me to the "Emerald City". Hope Glinda is nearby...

Dave
 
hennesse said:
Why buy two $300 PID temperature controllers (Proportional, Integral, Derivative) when I can just write the software to do the job?
Click to expand...

May I ask, how you do the temperature measurement?

- sensors?
- analog to digital conversion?

The cheapest method I can imagine, would be to plug Pt100 resistors to the dac/adc channels of the sound card, did you manage this, or do you employ a cheap DAQ device?

Best regards

Rolf
 
Rolf,

I purchased the RTD sensors for auberins.com I think the two in the HLT and MT were PT100-L50NPT and the BOIL kettle was a metric size which I can't find right now.

The RTD controller is an 8033 from SuperLogics.com
http://superlogics.com/serial-data-acquisition-sensor-specific/ad-module-rs-485/8033/122-791.htm

For the PIDs, I just used the psuedocode from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller. But that needs an anti-windup strategy which I implemented as only keeping N samples. Tuning the PID is a pain.

For the SSRs, I use a 1 in 10 discipline, so the SSR sensitivity is 10% of PID output - i.e. PID says 5%, SSR's are 0. PID says 7.5%,SSRs are 10% - 1 second on, 9 seconds off.

Hope this helps.
Dave
 
hennesse said:
I’m developing software on FreeBSD for an advanced home beer brewery, and I might want to sell the software in the future. But how can I distribute it?

The target customer would have a spare Windows PC, but would not have much computer knowledge. Installing FreeBSD would be way too complicated for the target customer to do.
Click to expand...
Which means you're developing your software for the wrong operating system.
 
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