Update on progress for Kegmon 2.0

Sept 16, 2025
Software

Update on progress for Kegmon 2.0

The inital kegmon hardware setup was based on the older ESP8266 and was updated to ESP32s2/s3 later on. Some of the requests for updates would not work with the current hardware limitations, both RAM, GPIO pins and CPU so I needed to look for new options. The inital feature list contained the following:

  • Support up to 4 scales (potentially i can support more scales since there are more pins available)
  • TFT touch display with nice User interface
  • SD card for data logging to prolong life of internal flash
  • 16Mb ROM which is needed when using TFT and all the needed libraries
  • Dual core CPU so that display and scale reading can be done in separate threads
  • Enough GPIO pins for scales and other sensors
  • Compatible with the current scale design and RJ45 connector
  • Use only DS18B20 as temperature sensors since the other options in 1.0 are not stable enough and one temperature sensor per scale base
  • Support for bluetooth to use Chamber Controller as temperature sensor.
  • Support all current push targets and network based temperature sensors.

If you have other suggestions then open an issue on github.

This time i started with a PCB design to see how this would look and also make it easier to build a prototype. I'm still waiting for some of the components to arrive but I have enough for initial hardware testing. I will add soldering pads for adding a separate DS18B20 in case you want to use that outside of the scale base. I'm not sure that I will need the pullups for the HX-data pins since internal pullups can be used so these might also be omitted in the next pcb version.

Kegmon PCB

Software options

For the software side I will use LVGL for the UI since that has worked well in the Chamber Controller and Gravitymon Gateway projects. But more on the UI design in a future post. The current library for the HX711 scale is no longer maintained so I needed to find another options and RobTillaart/HX711 is actively maintained. There is also one variant library that I will try out. Currently i'm working on testing all the hardware and removing all the obsolete code from v1.0 so I hope to have a release done before the end of the year. But I will not rush this since I want to have a stable and well tested release.

I also found out that the pink boards that I have been using have an option to do 80 samples per second instead of the default 10 samples per second. This will be interesting to try out and see if it improves the accuracy of the scale readings. This is changed using two solder pads on the back of the board. And here is a picture of the first prototype:

Kegmon Prototype

Happy brewing, Magnus

Kegmon