Seems like Brewblox development really slowed in the past year or so. Just wondering what the future plans for this platform are?
1 Like
The release cadence has slowed (probably a bit too much), but development is still active. As the project matures, we are evaluating what works, what must be done, and where our scope ends.
On the hardware side, two long-term projects are getting closer to completion: analog/RTD sensors, and the wired pressure/SG sensor. The latter has proven much more troublesome than expected, and has swallowed a lot of dev time.
On the software side, the main concern is UX. We need to make the important buttons easier to find, and make the total number of settings less overwhelming. We’ve been working on this for a while now, and you can expect more gradual improvements and reworks.
To improve maintainability, we do reserve time to rework and clean up old code even if it doesn’t yield any user features. This prevents us getting bogged down later.
For deployment, the idea keeps popping up to have a hosted/cloud version of the software. We’re looking at options, but on-premise deployment remains the default solution.
To help with both, we are introducing (optional) password authentication in the upcoming release.
3 Likes
Good to hear. Given the news lately that homebrewing is on the decline right now I guess I was a bit concerned that investment in this product was declining.
On the topic of the UI. I would love to see the ability to add navigation buttons between dashboards. On a tablet the side menu is rather space consuming. The URL Label on a layout would work. Even better would be a widget that one could say place across the bottom of a dashboard. Or an optional fixed nav bar configurable with the desired dashboards.
Putting everything on one dashboard works, but finger scrolling when one has charts often inadvertently scales the charts instead of scrolling.
1 Like
I’ll make a note of it. In the long run, we’re thinking about how we can unify layouts and dashboards to get the best of both. If the long run turns out to be very long, navigation shortcuts for dashboards could be very useful.
On what platform does this happen? For mobile displays, it should only scale the graph when maximized, not on the dashboard itself.
I’m running the Fully Kiosk browser on a Fire 10 tablet. But I just tried on it on my iPhone in Safari and it doesn’t do that.
Does the tablet show widgets side-by-side? We switch to full mobile view based on screen size.
We could make this graph widget behavior conditional on a system setting - we’d rather not do it automatically for all touch-capable devices.
Yes, tablet displays widgets side by side. A setting would be great.
Really looking forward to the pressure sensor and software to this. With Brewblox I can now remotely control temperature in my fermenters at all stages but I’m missing an option to control pressure remotely.
Thanks!