uSlackr

Background

I was asked by a pro-brewer to help him monitor fermentation temp control. In a pro brewery, fermentation control is the key to good and repeatable outcome (aka "good beer"). He uses Solo 4848 PID controllers from Automation Direct inside the brewey to monitor and control temps. What he asked of me was a way to monitor and control the controller(s).

Getting started

My first goal was to connect it to a PC. I purchased a USB <=> RS485 adapter off Amazon and a RTD temp probe for testing. He provided the Solo 4848. Next I downloaded the Solo Configuration software from AutomationDirect. It's free and helped we understand what what happening in the device.
To control the controller via modbus, you must set the On-line Configuration parameter (Cosh, P3-12) to on. This is done through the faceplate controls.
Once set, I was able to see the device with the Solo software via modbus communications.

Once I had this working, I my next goal was get it into Home Assistant using their modbus integra

ESPHome with M5 Stack Tube pressure sensor

Device documents: https://docs.m5stack.com/en/unit/tube_pressure

This device returns a linear voltage (0.1 - 3.1v) based on the pressure. This allows us to use the generic ADC device with EPShome. Due to the limited voltage range of the adc, you have to use the attentuate feature. I used attenuate: auto and it worked fine. I used a lambda function to convert the voltage to pressure (kPA) and to psi. The divide by 6.89... is the psi conversion. Then I round it to one decimal place. I added a device class of pressure and unit_of_measurement of psi.

esphome:
  name: temp-ctrl-1
  friendly_name: Temp Ctrl 1

esp32:
  board: nodemcu-32s
 # framework:

	[client]
	user = "mysql_user"
	password = "mysql_password"
	host = "localhost"

	install-module 7zip4powershell
	# Extract all rar files in a tree\path
	# All files wind up in output path
	cd "top-level\folder"
	gci -Directory -recurse \| foreach {gci "$_\*.rar" \| foreach {Expand-7Zip $_ -targetpath t:\some-output\path }}