Rebuilding My Tilt Hydrometer Logger as a Single Dockerized Service
I brew beer, and for the last few years I’ve tracked fermentation with a Tilt Hydrometer — a battery-powered sensor that floats in the fermenter and broadcasts the current temperature and specific gravity over Bluetooth Low Energy. Watching gravity fall over a week or two is the easiest way to know fermentation is actually happening and when it’s done. The catch with the Tilt is that something has to be in BLE range, always listening, to capture those readings and do anything useful with them. For years that something was a pair of scripts I wrote running on a Raspberry Pi next to my fermentation fridge. They worked, but using them had become a genuine chore. So I tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it as a single Dockerized service with a web interface. The result is tilt-monitor, and along the way I got to chase down a battery-age mystery and figure out why my Bluetooth mouse suddenly stopped working. ...