Tips for using NeoCat's Arduino Twitter library

This may be obvious to people who are better at programming than me, but I struggled to figure it out for a while. NeoCat's library can only post chars and char arrays to twitter, but readings are not in char format. To get around this I had to do some fiddly type conversions, which I lay out below.



itoa(var, varChar, 10);                               //converts 'var', which is an int, to 'varChar', which is a char
                                                                //If anyone can tell me what the '10' is for, please do

stringone = String(stringone + varChar  );    //make a string called stringone. Append the newly formed  

                                                                  //char 'varChar', which was the int 'var'.

                                                                   

   stringone.toCharArray(msg, 100);             //convert 'stringone' to char array (reads "value of the in
                                                                  //'var'")
                                                                  //save the char array as 'msg'. 100 is the number of
                                                                  //characters in the char array.
twitter.post(msg);                                       //posts data to twitter

'msg' must be declared as a char at the beginning of the sketch.

Notes: 

var was declared as an int, it could be, for instance, an analog reading.

varChar was declared as a char[].

stringone does not need to be declared until it is made.

More chars and char arrays can be added to stringone by using the + symbol and the char name.

Success!

So, having finished making my immersion heater and insulating jackets, I found the time to put down a new brew. It's an ale with honey making up the bulk of the extra sugars.

Anyway, I hooked the immersion heater up to my arduino thermostat, with the vat snug in its wet suit, and off it went. I did, however, however, have a slight hiccough with the thermostat. Before plugging it in and leaving it, I decided to do a double-check that everything was working fine. It wasn't. Long story short, my power supply wasn't stable enough to form a stable reference voltage, so the temperature reading varied by +/- ~15 degrees C. Ridiculous... Anyway, I plugged the arduino into my laptop, plugged the charger in, and left the whole lot looking after the beer.

6 days later, it was bottling time.

Homebrew experiments.

As my previous post may imply, I've been playing around with homebrewing beer and with controlling the various processes involved in this. From now on, I plan to post my various prototypes, ideas, plans, and findings here. At the moment my list of things to integrate into my system includes:

-Improved thermostatic control, possibly using a PID system

-Immersion heater for direct heating of the brew, this also saves space

-Electronic hydrometer to tell me the specific gravity of the brew, the alcohol content, and when it is time to bottle

-A convenient, inexpensive, and space efficient method of thermally insulating the brewing vat.

I guess while I'm at it I'll also post the results and recipes of my more experimental brewing attempts.

Homebrew homebrewing thermostat

I've just finished my first protoype of my hombrew thermostat. Here is the schematic:

The source code is available at: http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,58725.0.html