Kegerface – for all your beer stocking needs

Kegerface is a digital tap list display from SchrodingersDrunk, which you can read more about over on Reddit. It’s an interface for a Kegerator, hence the name. I had to look that up – a Kegerator is a device for dispensing draught beer in the home, involving all kinds of kit like a fridge and a tank full of carbon dioxide. In the picture below, it’s the thing with the spigots sticking out of it. We, of course, are interested in what’s going on above the spigots. Click to embiggen The back-end here is some PHP which interprets data from a shared Google spreadsheet. The whole thing runs off a Raspberry Pi that’s attached to the back of the display. All the information you need is here: the type of beer, the ABV, the hoppiness (scored out of three – that’s what the green glyphs represent), the maker, and, most importantly, how much you have left. You can find SchrodingersDrunk’s code, along with assets like those hop graphics on Github. The Kegerface is under a CC licence, and other Kegerator owners have been modifying the setup for their own use. Andy Davies has done a lot of work on his own version. He’s tweaked the interface, and added the bar temperature and a breakdown of how many pints are left in stock; he’s also using MySQL rather than going the CSV/PHP route. Compare with the interface above, and spot the differences! (Click to enlarge.) We deplore your taste in ginger beer, Andy. Hollows & Fentimans’ hard stuff is much nicer. Andy’s also made the Kegerface work for bottled beer as well as draught beers, and best of all, has made stock updating easier by attaching an RFID reader to an Arduino, which is then hooked up to the Pi. So every time you take a bottle, you swipe the attached RFID tag across the bar, and the stock is adjusted on the Kegerface. Again, everything’s on GitHub if you want to try building one yourself. I’m trying to work out whether it’s legal for us to get one of these for the office.

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3841