Tech Talk & Other Thoughts

Some nerd talk by Brian and other random thoughts

Specialty Grain Brewing Process – Ales

January 17, 2014 in Beer Projects, Beer Topics, Forum by Brian Thompson | No comments

homebrewtalk.com forum post

I’ve only been making beers for a short while and it seems that I’ve had so many questions about how to go about doing it while I was in the middle of making the beer. So I wrote down my game plan for specialty grain brewing process on my little website (not a commercial site). I’ve also pasted the text in here in case you don’t care to go to a unknown location, but I didn’t mess with the formatting. Let me know if you have any advice and perhaps this will help someone else. Thanks. 

http://bt.beerprojects.com/wordpress/?p=716

Specialty Grain Brewing Process – Ales

Low OG with All Extract brew

January 16, 2014 in Beer Projects, Beer Topics, Forum by Brian Thompson | No comments

homebrewtalk.com forum post

I have a brew that was supposed to have an OG of 1.080. When I measured it I got a reading of 1.077 after the correction (1.076 at 66 degrees). I took several measurements, spinning the hydrometer each time and consistently got the same result. I have a slight boil over, but other than that there really isn’t anything I can figure out how I didn’t get the expected OG. On top of that, using brewer’s friend extract calc I should be at 1.085 (5.25G water, 12 lbs LME).


Any ideas where I might have messed up?

Low OG with All Extract brew

time to cold crash temperature?

December 11, 2013 in Beer Projects, Beer Topics, Forum by Brian Thompson | No comments

homebrewtalk.com forum post

I’m curious to see how long others are seeing it take for the beer to get to the child crashed temperature? I have mine in a new self made fermentation chamber and it seems that it takes about 15-20 hours for it to go from 70 degrees to 37 degrees. The chamber is cold right away, but the thermal transfer is taking longer than I imagined

time to cold crash temperature?

Repeater bridge is now setup

October 23, 2013 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

I’m happy to say that I just got a repeater bridge setup using DD-wrt on both routers.  In the garage and in one bedroom the wireless signal from the main router doesn’t come in very well (or not at all).  this is particularly troubling since I plan to use some old phones as IP webcams to watch my beer ferment whenever I finish my fermentation chamber.

I read a lot of sites and watched several YouTube videos and failed many times.  Though I’m sure most sites were right I think the problem that I had was the encryption between the main router and the repeater router. Many blogs recommended getting the connection to work without without and then one that works setup the encryption.

I did a similar thing as many sites but with a one twist. Rather that have the repeater router connect to the main router over the real wireless lan (wl0), I setup a virtual lan on the main router. This allowed for a few nice things. First, I spent a really long time trying to get it setup directly to the wl0, jumping straight into an AES+TKIP link, and could never get it to work.  Secondly, once I went this route  I could mess with the setup without impacting the normal network with a few exceptions. This also allowed me to do the setup without turning the normal wireless into an unencrypted link.  Also, now my bridge link is hidden so I should really have any thing else using this link.

When I set this up I followed this YouTube video pretty extensively which for the changes of using a virtual lan on my main router the instructions are good.  When I got things connected I started with the AP_Bridge being visible and no encryption.  I then added the encryption and things worked.  I suppose I could have tried AES+TKIP, but I was happy with what I had working given that I spent a really long time prior to this.  Once that worked I hid the AP_Bridge.  To test things out I reset the Repeater_Bridge and it was able to connect just fine.    A quick check in the garage shows a strong signal from the repeater bridge and I should be set to go now.
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Jeep 730N RHR Nav Display Upgrade

October 13, 2013 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

Well it turns out Jeep has done a pretty bad job of maintaining the navigation unit software which has been buggy at best.  In our case it is the 730N RHR unit on the Jeep Grand Cherokee  After a lot of searching, mostly in the Jeep Garage website,  I was able to find a person, *sox*,  that hosts the files to upgrade the unit as described in this forum post.

Download the Files

Below is the link, username, and password to get the files.

www.mydrive.ch
username: mygig@soxag
password: gasolio

You will be downloading two files.  The software and the gracenotes ISOs.

As many posts point out version 2.169 is really buggy, was never released, and should not be used.  When I wrote this post 2.136 was the latest version to download.  Though I wonder if a new version is on the way since I saw a person post that they have 2.137.  Below is the path to the ISO file

 Home  MyGIG Software Update  Software – Gracenotes update  RHR-RHW-RHP 2011+ 

Next is the gracenotes.  At the time of this post 4118 was the latest version.  Below is the gracenotes file

 Home  MyGIG Software Update  Software – Gracenotes update  Gracenotes update  Gracenotes RHR-RHW-RHP 2011+ 

Once you have the files you can go about installing the files either of two ways: CD or USB

CD Method

If using the CD method many people, including myself, have had success using the free ImgBurn program.  Simply select the ISO file to burn to the CD and done.  Note: only one ISO per CD.

  1. Turn Car On to at least Accy mode. No need to start the ignition.
  2. Press power on 730n
  3. Load CD into CD Drive
  4. Close Door
  5. It can take a minute for the cd to be recognized.  If it isn’t eject the cd and start over on step 3.
  6. See the installation below

USB Method

I haven’t given this option a try but several posts have reported success. You’ll need a 4GB USB drive to do this.

  1. Turn Car On  to at least Accy mode. No need to start the ignition.
  2. Insert USB drive into USB port on radio.
  3. Press power on radio to turn radio off.
  4. Wait 5 to 10 Seconds and power Radio back on.
  5. It can take a minute for the USB drive to be recognized.  If it isn’t start over.

 Installation

Once it recognized the CD or USB drive you should be prompted to “Proceed with Update”  It will show you the current version and the version it will upgrade to.  Assuming this is what you want press Yes.  The installation took a while, but once it was done you can confirm the upgrade was successful in the System information.

 

20130513_214009
20130513_214013
20130513_212304
20130513_214605

 Parting thoughts

Hope this helps someone.  Turns out our hard drive failed in the unit and Jeep had to replace it.  The techs were suprised to see that my unit was upgraded to the latest version which goes to show how poor Jeep is at keeping the customers up to date.  Since the new hard drive was replaced and with the 2.136 version has been installed the nav unit has been much more stable.

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