[jcims]

I built an automated apparatus to convert water, yeast and starch into sanitizer in April/May of 2020.

I used ESP32s for individual sensing components (mostly temperature at various parts of the process but also a load cell for weight). I used the Tasmota firmware and tied them all together using MQTT over wifi. I drove it with node-red on a raspberry pi to build several PID loops and process controls and if I were to do anything similar again I would use the same architecture except I would add network booting for the ESP32s so I could swap them out as needed.

Screenshot from a node-red dashboard from very early in the process.

https://imgur.com/a/so7iZJX

I ended up with 7 temp sensors and two load cells running on four ESP32s. By the time I had it optimized my job was to swap containers out every time it said to replace container over a speaker.