The goal of Samovar is to combine various ready-made devices and make controlling them as simple as possible within a single concept.
The main concept of Samovar: through automation, to relieve the user of the routine operations involved in controlling brewing, distillation, rectification and so on.
Safety comes first in Samovar. Any event outside the permitted limits is stopped by Samovar immediately. At the same time, thanks to the open source code and the ability to use lua scripts, Samovar is flexible enough to adapt its parameters to almost any task.
What is the minimum configuration in which you can build Samovar?
It is enough to take an ESP32 microcontroller and load a program (sketch) into it. Then let the ESP32 connect to your WiFi network, and the Samovar interface will appear on your computer. The ESP will be powered over the USB connector. But it will not be able to show any data. Nor will it be able to control equipment, of course.
Connect the temperature sensors first. And since the computer is usually in one place and the column in another, you can power the ESP from any phone charger.
This is where Samovar already turns into your adviser. It will show on the monitor and send to your smartphone messages: boost complete, turn on the water, stabilization complete, temperatures exceeded, pause, and so on. And at the same time you see all the temperatures you need. If vapor breaks through, a message appears, there are charts, you can analyze the behavior of the column, and so on.
But stability and safety are up to you. Samovar only advises, while you turn the knobs and "taps". It starts to get tiresome. Something needs to be automated.
As an example, let us take a beginner's standard equipment.
A 3 kW heating element and an ordinary thyristor regulator with a knob...
Let us automate the boost. In the heating element assembly, leave 2 elements on the regulator and connect one to a 16 A solid-state relay (SSR). Connect the relay control to the corresponding pin (the fourth relay channel, RELE_CHANNEL4 — D13)*.
Switch on. Set on the regulator only the voltage needed for normal column operation, say 200 volts, then give Samovar the "Turn on heating" («Включить нагрев») command, and in addition to the regulator it will connect the boost heating element at full power through the SSR. When vapor reaches the column and the sensor at the top of the column detects it, Samovar switches off the boost heating element, leaving only the regulator.
So you no longer need to watch and wait for the boiler to boil in order to lower the voltage yourself. Samovar will do that.
But again, constantly turning the regulator knob to stabilize the column is no great pleasure... Especially if rectification lasts about 20 hours.
So, to save your nerves and health, it is highly desirable first of all to get a
stabilizer ( RMV-k, KVIC, RM) or to build a
SEM_AVR regulator yourself.
And now previously unavailable possibilities open up:
1. Automatic power control depending on the running program, including constantly holding the column in the pre-flooding state**, switching the heating off by boiler temperature and, most importantly, automatically switching the heating off if vapor breaks through or the water temperature is exceeded!
2. And of course, stable heating.
In this way, step by step, with the help of Samovar, you can automate almost the entire process by gradually connecting other devices. Each new device opens up new possibilities.
Keep in mind that connecting an SSR or a stabilizer is probably the very limit of what you can do with a phone charger. Any further progress will require a more serious power supply.
* The ESP32 outputs 3.3 volts with limited current, so not every solid-state relay will work "out of the box".
** When a level sensor and certain types of regulators are used.
