Home Brewing
In recent years there have been significant changes to the availability of home brewing equipment, mostly due to the ubiquitous deployment of Craft Breweries throughout North America and Europe. The trickle down effect means the average home brewer has progressed beyond the plastic bucket and has a few more high tech arrows in their quiver.
The RAPT Pill allows you to instantly read and log the specific gravity and temperature of your fermentation via the RAPT mobile app on your compatible Android smartphone or tablet, Apple iPhone/iPad or via the RAPT IoT hub on your Windows or Mac Computer.
What is RAPT?
The RAPT IOT Hub is a free service whereby any RAPT enabled product can both log and store data to the hub where you can conveniently access this data. The RAPT hub can also allow you to control your devices remotely giving you absolute control of the device irrespective of where you are. The RAPT portal enables you to make complex temperature profiles that involve different temperature settings over time meaning you can start/run a temp profile giving you a set and forget experience. The RAPT portal also controls the alert/notification process for you so you can receive email notification in the off instance that something doesn't go to plan.
There is no limit to the number of RAPT devices you can connect the RAPT IOT Hub. This is in contrast to other popular wireless hydrometers where you are limited by the number of hydrometers you can connect to an app.
Hydrometer and thermometer
The idea of placing a device that lives in-situ while your wort is fermenting to measure specific gravity and temperature has been around for awhile. The first devices that popularized this practice were the Tilt, the iSpindle, and the Float. The over-riding advantages of using a digital hydrometer are: less chance of introducing wort infection as a consequence of drawing samples for external measurement; and preservation of volume. It also allows for obtaining readings during spunding without having to exercise parasitic draw down of the fermentation vessel. The current enabling technologies these devices use are Wifi, Bluetooth, Li_ion cells, and miniature gyro sensors.
Advantages:
1: the use of Li-Ion 18650 rechargeable cells give a higher density and more precise and consistent center of gravity than devices that may use smaller or non-rechargeable cells, and this should result in less variability in SG readings that are so easily affected by interference in the wort caused by metabolic turbulence, and subsequent adhesion of hop detritus to the hydrometer case.
2: Flexibility: the use of Wifi or bluetooth
a: Most home internet ecosystems already have Wifi running persistently. Both Bluetooth and Wifi devices use the 2.4 GHz band, so they have the potential to conflict.
b: If a digital hydrometer is using bluetooth to transmit data, and you want to collect that data in a log file, then you have 2 options:
1a) The need to always have a device (tablet, smart phone, etc.) that is running the hydrometer software in real time open, and is capable of receiving bluetooth signals near your fermenter. In turn, if you want to transmit that data to a cloud based log file, then that device is also Internet connected. This means the extra burden and cost of having a dedicated device you can leave near your fermenter at all times, and probably having it plugged in. For battery only powered devices, this is not an advisable charging algorithm.
2a) If you can place you receiving device near your fermenter, then, if only using Bluetooth, the battery can last 2+ years before needing to be recharged. (Please note: The RAPT Pill is fully wifi and Bluetooth capable. At present it can be integrated fully with wifi. Bluetooth integration will be enabled with a later firmware update.)
3: USB C interface. The presence of a USB C interface is not only convenience, it is a signal that the rest of the device's component architecture is not potentially as outdated as devices that use the older and depecrated legacy connections such as micro USB.
