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+--- Thread: oCBot: KC868-A6/A16 as a process controller for a small distillery (Ukraine) (/showthread.php?tid=9851)
oCBot: KC868-A6/A16 as a process controller for a small distillery (Ukraine) - oCBot - 10-01-2026
Hi everyone,
I'm Ihor from Ukraine. For the past months we've been building oCBot — firmware and a cloud workspace that turn the KC868-A6 and KC868-A16 into process controllers for farms, homesteads and craft production. Our first use case is distilling; the same core runs cheesemaking, fermentation and greenhouses.
What it does on the board today:
- flashing from the browser in a couple of minutes, no toolchain;
- DS18B20 probes, analog inputs, RS485/Modbus devices, relays and PWM outputs;
- scenarios that drive a process stage by stage and only call the operator when a decision is needed;
- operator panels assembled from buttons and gauges without code, opened from a phone over Wi-Fi or remotely through our cloud (optional);
- several controllers working as one system, with a log of every run.
Something we learned on the A16 that may save someone a few evenings:
- After an OTA update or a reset (RST button, EN, esp_restart) the Ethernet link flaps and never gets an IP — only Wi-Fi comes up. A full power cycle brings Ethernet back. As far as we can tell from the schematic, the LAN8720 nRST is on RST_NET, which is not wired to any ESP32 GPIO, so firmware cannot reset the PHY itself. A software retry (esp_eth_stop/start) did not help on our boards. Our workaround: use the Wi-Fi address after OTA, power-cycle for LAN.
- There is no free DAC on the A16: GPIO25/26 are taken by the Ethernet RMII.
More details and the list of supported hardware: ocbot.the.in.ua/en/hardware
Questions and feedback welcome. If you run something similar on the A6/A16, I'd like to hear how you solved it.