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GF Connect v0.9.2 Released

This is a maintenance release which solves the need for manually pairing with your Grainfather controller on the first launch. GF Connect will now automatically scan for the controller and pair the bluetooth connection without need for editing the configuration.

The bluetooth communication for GF Connect v0.9.2 has been changed to use the node-red-contrib-noble-bluetooth component instead of node-red-contrib-generic-ble. This component will need to be added to Node-RED. You can add this from the Palette Manager in Node-RED or from the command line using the following commands:

$ cd ~/.node-red
$ npm install node-red-contrib-noble-bluetooth

Important: If you have node-red-contrib-generic-ble v3.1.0 installed, you either need to disable the component or update to v4.0.1. Otherwise it will not be possible to connect to your Grainfather controller. Make sure to restart Node-RED after installing the new bluetooth component using the following command:

$ node-red-restart

Download and Installation

GF Connect v0.9.2 can be downloaded from the Github repository clausbroch/node-red-gfconnect

GF Connect requires Node RED and a few other components. For details about how to install Node RED and the required other components, please refer to this previous post.

If you want to install GF Connect as a project directly into Node RED, please refer to the description in this previous post.

Please report any issues with GF Connect to the Github issue tracker.

11 Replies to “GF Connect v0.9.2 Released”

  1. New version works great! Connected immediately and was able to get a delayed start to brew in the morning. The only issue I’ve noticed so far is that, in the menu on the left, GF Connect is listed 3 times, with the third entry being the correct one

    1. Rest of the brew day went great, but is there some way to make the Brewfather api key survive a reboot?

    2. Thank you for the comment. Good to hear that it’s generally working great for you. Regarding the duplicate menus then I am mainly speculating here since you have not described how you install GFConnect. I suspect that this might be caused by copy/paste of the flow into an existing flow. If this is the case then you should be able to fix the problem by deleting everything in your flow and then paste a fresh flow into Node-RED. This comment section is somewhat limited for the purpose of offering support, so feel free to open a new issue on https://github.com/clausbroch/node-red-gfconnect/issues if the above doesn’t solve your problem.

  2. Awesome stuff! I now have the gfconnect flow and tiltpi flow set up on my Raspberry Pi with a touch screen – usually i have it displaying my tilt readings, but on a brew day i can just switch it over to gfconnect from the menu and get my brew on, controlling it from the touch screen.

    About the duplicate menus – i ran into the same thing as i had to play around with the flows a bit and just deleted them from under Dashboard > Layout.

      1. Unfortunately it seems gfconnect and tiltpi sometimes overlap as they seem to be fighting over who gets to use the bluetooth adapter. I’ll play around with the flows a bit to see if i can solve this somehow.

  3. Awesome work. I am having an issue with custom boil temperatures. In the equipment profile in Brewfather I have the boil temperature set to 94.8 C, which is slightly below my actual boil temperature.
    The problem I have is the GF controller doesn’t move on to the boil step, it stays in the heating phase. Without an option to move to the next step, I have to run a timer on my phone for the entire 90min boil.
    Are custom boil temperatures not supported?

    1. Thank you for the feedback.
      Currently custom boil temperature is not supported, but I will look into adding support for it the next release.

  4. Hi, thanks for creating and sharing your project. I’ve been excited to try it. My device arrived so I have followed your instructions and installed on a Pi 4 (4Gb). I can get the gfconnect:1880/ui dashboard to show up however my internet browsing won’t work until I stop node-red? Presumably for the same reason, the Brewfather and Pushover integration doesn’t work. Any ideas? I can follow your instructions but not knowledgeable enough when it doesn’t work 🙂

  5. Hi,
    Are there any possibility to lock the found Bluetooth mac-adress so it would be dedicated in future sessions?
    I uses 2 connect and 2 Rpi and it would be nice if I could always connect same unit to each Rpi.

    1. It should be possible without too much effort. However since I dont have more than on GF myself it is probably not something that I would spend time on in the near future. However, the code is freely available on github so you are welcome to contribute this addition.

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