Use an Old Phone as a BrewPi Display

I recently got my BrewPi up and running, and thought it would be nice to have a display. Most people do this with an LCD display, but I was thinking to myself, I have an old phone, why not use that? This also gives you more flexibility, since you don't have to be tied to your fermentation chamber. Once I rebuild my keezer/bar, I want to display my upcoming beer, and my fermentation chamber will be in a different room. You can even use it to adjust your temps and everything, since it is, after all, a phone. I doubt I'm the first one to do this, but a couple quick Google searches didn't show anything, so I figured it was blog worthy.

The process is fairly simple and shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Basically, I created a tweaked version of the LCD display on the BrewPi webui, and we will access it with our phone. Easy peasy.

First, wipe your phone, or prepare it in any way you wish. Now, install Dolphin Browser on your phone. It is a free, cross-platform web browser that runs on old phones (I'm using Motorola's original Droid) and allows us to run the browser in full screen mode, so it looks like a real display. It will also keep the screen awake. Very important.

Now, grab my LCD code. On your BrewPi, do the following (replace the path with wherever you installed the BrewPi webui, if you are using the older Debian Wheezy, it is /var/www/):


sudo wget http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=6ZX7hRLF -O /var/www/html/lcd.php

Now, fix the permissions:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/lcd.php
sudo chmod 654 /var/www/html/lcd.php

Ok. All that's left to do is to fire up Dolphin on your phone, and go to http://brewpi/lcd.php (or the IP address/hostname of your BrewPi). Pretty neat, huh? It's a good idea to set this as your homepage, so it's easy to get back to. You can adjust the size of the text by editing the font size on line 81 of /var/www/lcd.php. Adjust it, save it, and refresh Dolphin until the text fills your screen.

All that's left to do is change a couple settings in Dolphin for our use case. Go to Settings (Depending on your Android version, you may have to either click the settings/menu dots or the Dolphin to get to settings.) -> Advanced -> Customize -> More and select "Keep Screen On".  Then, click either Control Panel, or the puzzle piece and click Full Screen. If the URL bar is still showing, just go into the settings and back out, and it should go away. Now just mount your phone wherever you want to view your fermentation chamber status and plug in a charging cable. Have a homebrew, we're done!

If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments.