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160 proof today's the day Welcome back to Prime Stills. We are always glad when you're with us and today we're going over the talking Audible, proven trail hydrometer.

Welcome everybody, all you hobbyist brewers distillers and if you're just plain interested in what we have to offer, Prime Stills we're here to try to unlock the mysteries of home distilling. Every once in a while, we get a chance to geek out and we geek out on our latest development when we put together and this took us over a little over a month of some really hard work but we put together this audible proof for trail hydrometer, and you just heard that working, so you can listen and hear what your proof is provided you have a parent, as opposed to trying to read that small scale. We develop this for our blind community. But we think that there are some adaptations and some useful purposes for it. And many of the rest of you in the community who either are vision impaired. Just kind of a neat thing to have. 

There are 1000 ways to do this. If you know anything about electronics, you know that there's more than one way to wire that puppy. The perfect trial hydrometer you've heard of in action. In sharing this with you. I'm just going to provide you with the basic information you need right now with a parts list and then follow up on discussion, we will go through the process of actually plugging it putting them together and plugging the wires in to make it work. It's not that difficult. Warning on the programming portion can be a little bit tedious. I'm going to flash up a couple of things. I'm powering it with a nine volt battery. You can also power it with a USB cable and you know the USB plug on the other side that fits into your Arduino Uno. Either way works and there's many different power sources it takes up to around 12 volts because it's kind of like a voltage regulator in this already mounted in the circuit board. So that's the power that goes in. And what that does is it activates the time of the flight center that's located on the top of this tube. 

This time of flight sensor sends a beam down to the top of our proof and trail hydrometer reflects that beam. And then it measures the distance or the time it took for that beam to travel down and back up, converting that into a distance in millimeters. Now this time of flight sensor is a vl. This is the vl 53 l one x. That time of flight sensor takes that information and sends it back to the Arduino. This Arduino has been loaded with the program because it's a microprocessor. All it does is one thing. 

It tabulates that information. And then what it does is it determines the distance And then we have an algorithm in there, that converts that from millimeters into a proof. We have this micro SD card adapter that takes a small micro SD card, boom right there, that you load your own voice or someone else's voice doesn't matter whose voice it is. But you'll add, you'll record numbers, 123454, and so forth. And you'll load that on here.

I'll tell you how to convert that into a WAV file that's necessary the 1600 megahertz or 1600 hertz file, and then you leave that in here. So the Arduino says, it's 161 proof. I want you to go get me 160 and one and proof WAV files. It does that by spit them out and it goes out on pin number four. wire goes to my lm 386 amplifier. Super direct, easy to wire up, positive, negative, and then an end in the end comes from pin number four from your Arduino which is the signal that goes in there comes out these two wires, which are positive negative goes into my speaker, and lo and behold, it says 161 proof.I will continue to say that as long as that doesn't change, it keeps getting the same information. As soon as that information changes, lo and behold, what the program does program says, go to the SD card reader. I want you to get me 150 and five, and proof. It does that. Spit it out, spits it out through the LM 386 155 program. It will continue to do that. 

I have found that one nine volt battery. This is an energizer I used a regular rail back, this rail bag battery was able to operate this for seven hours straight. I Sat out here in the shop and I listened to myself for seven hours. It lasted seven hours on the battery. Or if you plugged it into your computer using the USB cable, it's going to last indefinitely until you unplug that computer or you run out of battery power and computer or whatever. 

We put a small button on the top. I switched the hot wire on the speaker. I put a button, a push button so you push the button it's on if you push the button,When I pushed a button and it was connected to the speaker and the speaker would spit out. And then once you heard it four or five times, you could push the button, shut it up, which keeps things quiet, it's still doing it. It's just not getting to the speaker and then you just push the button.

I got my time of flight sensor mounted in the cap. So it mounts in the cap, but I've got a slit cut on the side for the wires to go through. It goes right back on top. Once you print it up, sync it up a little bit, put it in a box, solder it in the right place. It looks really cool. It works. Because that's all it does is one thing over again. 

When it comes to parents, there are two major models on the market, The first parent has a large cup on the side that collects your spirit and acts as its own vent. It comes up through the center and rolls over the top into the collection on the side and runs out your spout.

The second parent has a tube that goes only in here to collect the spirit. Got a small vein, so it does the same thing. Your spirits could run up through the center and across, it overflows into the collection port and then goes right out of your exit port. The interesting thing is, is that the distance between here and the distance between here just happens to be the same thing. So our program works for both of these exactly the same way without any adjustment. If you have a different model and a different version for what you have, you're gonna have to make your adjustments in the program in order to fit your specific physical environment. 

I got a digital caliper and I'm going to tell you the difference. The major difference between the two corners is the height the first one is probably about a half inch shorter, but that has no effect on it whatsoever because none of the distances it still accepts a hydrometer. If I measure this outside diameter that is two inches, they use a two inch outside diameter stainless steel pipe, we get us a two inch inside diameter plastic PVC pipe.Its perfectly okay and it sits right over top. 

What we do need to do though is just a small Shim shimming it up on the inside so it fits on nice and snug and it stops right there at the top. We know that the first one's two inch. The difference is that the second one is one and a half inches. So there's a half inch difference. Therefore we use a one and a half inch pipe. What I also used was, a small piece of pipe that you would use underneath the sink and drain pipe, and I just slide that in there and what that does is it gives me enough shimming power in order to fit over top of the nice and snug all the way down. 

That's the step by step guide. I’ll tell  you what we did with the proof and trail hydrometer because you'll notice we had made an adaptation to it. Remember, we're firing a beam to the top of this thing. And instead of trying to fine tune that to try to make that beam hit the top of that, and reflect directly back up, all we did was we had to increase that surface area. So that no matter if it just moved a little bit, which you know that a hydrometer does the proof of trail high drummer if it if your parrot moves, it moves. And so what we wanted was an accurate reading at all times, we wonder where it was where we want to know where it is all the time, because this thing is constantly taking measurements and has taken hundreds of measurements and it's doing hundreds of averages to get exactly as close to perfect as it can. We always want to know where it is; we don't want to give it any false data. 

In order to do that, what we needed to do is we needed to attach an old document protector, the real thing, you can use blue, you can use red, you can use green, I just used black because I just figured it was better. That's all I have found no difference in the colors. Just don't use white or Don't Don't use clear kind of defeats the purpose. I kind of square that a one and a half inch square. What I will do is I will shape that down with a pair of scissors to fit the inside of my tube with enough room so we can bounce around. I tried several different methods and it came up. It turned out to be probably the most direct and easiest one for me to use. I had this small glass edger. And what I did was I just scratched up the top of it,  And then I did the same thing to the plastic hat that was put on this. And then I used superglue and placed that on top.And that worked extremely well.