Raspberry Pi with camera to image Inkbird display

Beer chiller to cool the fermentation

Parasene soil warming cable to warm the fermentation (75W) along with SS coil to cool it, attached to beer chiller

Sourcecode to generate a CSV file of temperatures

It is very important that you tightly crop around the digits of the display, removing the degrees Celsius notation and trying to crop above the decimal point, otherwise you will get erroneous values.

#!/bin/bash

while true; do

	# Take photo using current date	
	DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H%M")
	raspistill -vf -hf -o $DATE.jpg

	ARRAY=()
	X=0

	# Try different thresholds
	for I in 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10; do

		# Ensure there is at least PIX pixels
		for PIX in 50 20 5; do
			
			# Shear image by different amounts 
			for SHEAR in 65 10; do

				Z=$(../../ssocr/ssocr -d3 -i$PIX rotate 359 crop 600 825 1230 550 shear $SHEAR -t$I -f white ${DATE}.jpg -o dump.jpg)
	
				# Ensure exit code was 0, meaning OCR detected numbers of 3 digits
				if [ $? -eq 0 ] && [ "${Z: -1}" != "-" ]; then
					echo $Z
					# Store number from OCR as integer, convert b to 6 
					# (as ssocr sometimes thinks 6 is B in hex)
					NUMI=$(echo "$(echo $Z | sed "s/b/6/g")" | bc)	
					((ARRAY[$NUMI]++))
					X=1
				fi
			done
		done 
	done

	if [ $X -eq 0 ]; then
		# Failed to detect display correctly	
		echo ${DATE} >> bad
	else
		LOW=0
		LVAL=-1

		# Find best value out of possible candidate OCRd values
		for var in "${!ARRAY[@]}";
		do	
			# Check if this number appears the most common	
			if [ ${ARRAY[$var]} -gt $LOW ]; then
				LOW=${ARRAY[$var]}
				LVAL=$var
			fi
		done
		
		# Convert number to decimal
		NUM=$(echo "scale = 2; $LVAL / 10" | bc)

		# Write number to CSV
		echo "${DATE},$NUM" >> temps
		
		rm ${DATE}.jpg
	fi

	sleep 60
done

Gnuplot file to generate graph

set key off
set term png transparent truecolor
set title "Fermentation Temperature" textcolor rgb "orange" font "Helvetica,50" 
set object 1 rectangle from graph 0, graph 0 to graph 1, graph 1 behind fc rgbcolor 'white' fs noborder
set term png size 2000,900 font "Helvetica,30" 
set xtics textcolor rgb "orange" 
set ytics textcolor rgb "orange" 
set output 'inkbird.png'
set datafile separator ','
set yrange [10:30]
set xdata time
set timefmt '%Y-%m-%d-%H%M'
set format x "%d %b %Y"
set xtics format "%d %b %Y %H\:%M"
set xtics rotate 90
set xtics 86400
plot 'temps.csv' using 1:2 with lines 

Run Gnuplot

The awk part to strip out erroneous values, should hopefully not be necessary anymore by trying more thresholds, hopefully the right value will be obtained after OCRing and selecting.

# Target temp value set on Inkbird
# Used to strip out values less than target-7 or greater target+7
# which are likely due to incorrect OCRing

TARGET="20.0"

LTARGET=$(echo "$TARGET - 7" | bc)
HTARGET=$(echo "$TARGET + 7" | bc)

cat temps | awk -F, '{ if ($2 >= $LTARGET && $2 <= $HTARGET ) print $1 "," $2 }' > temps.csv

gnuplot temp.plt

Example image from RPi camera of Inkbird

Fermentation graph on XFCE wallpaper

while [ true ]; do

	ssh [email protected] "cd ~/Repositories/inkbirdOCR; ./plot.sh"
	scp [email protected]:/home/pi/Repositories/inkbirdOCR/inkbird.png .

	composite -gravity Center inkbird.png jelly.jpg new.jpg
	xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/workspace0/last-image -s "`pwd`/new.jpg"

	sleep 900
done

Latest version of script

https://github.com/anfractuosity/inkbirdOCR

SSOCR

SSOCR can be obtained from https://github.com/auerswal/ssocr. Many thanks to Erik for producing
such an awesome program and for helping me out!.