SanPancho
Well-Known Member
starting this thread as a place to go through the issues that are coming up with the Brewzilla 4 and its interaction with the RAPT portal. as @Bottoms_Up and others like myself have noted in the main Brewzilla 4 thread here there's quite a bit of evidence of ship-fast-fix-it-later things with both BZ4 and how it works with RAPT.
the marketing of BZ4+RAPT led me to believe there was much more in the way of instant, easy, mobile-friendly control coming in the package than what i've seen in my limited time with the unit.
i'll start with the biggest thing i thought was oversold/BS'd :
1-- the marketing seemed to say that using RAPT with the BZ4 would enable alerts to generated for you with the new wifi access. however the "alert" you get is ..... an email. not a text, or a phone notification, alarm, etc. an email. good for record keeping i guess, but as a time-sensitive message? nerp. (I've solved this issue, and now get text messages. happy to share the fix)
2- the celsius /fahrenheit changes dont stick in RAPT. also noted in the main BZ4 thread. rapt will convert to F. but the next time you look it might be showing you numbers in C, but it still says F. i kept getting my 150f cleaning temp target going back and forth between 150F and 65F. then back to 150F. then 65F. annoying.
3- the profiles you create on RAPT for BZ4 have multiple steps you can program, and you can also set those (email) alerts. but for some reason when you open up a profile you've saved earlier it doesnt show you the alerts. i've gone in and played with it a bunch. i dont see anything that shows when an alert is present/saved as a step in the profile. not sure why that isnt viewable with the rest of the steps. seems kind of important?
4- the mobile app doesnt appear to be an actual app. for reference, im on iPhone SE (2nd) and iOS 16. i used app store, downloaded RAPT and it took me to what appeared to be the regular app.rapt.io web portal. huh, ok. i searched around, saw a link to the Gen 4 instruction manual, and clicked. it popped up, but i i ended up having to hard close the "app" as there was no actual navigation button or other way to go "back" or close the document. WTF. so i try again, and as im going through and playing in the portal i realize its not really an app like you normally think of an app. it seems like its just a shortcut/link to the web portal. after eating lunch and going back in to play around some more i realized i couldn't find the app on my phone. i looked and looked, nothing. checked the "utilities" widget that has three apps inside of it, no luck. thinking i might have done something wrong, i went back to app store and was going to download it again. except that i couldnt. the app store button said "open" on app store, not "get". so yes, i had the "app" on my phone. but there's no button on my home screens. whenever i wanted to open it i had to go to app store to get the "open" button as it didnt exist on my phone with a normal button/widget on my home screens. so to sum it all up: not an "app" with its own environment, just a glorified hotlink to the web portal. and doesnt even save to your phone, had to keep going to app store to use it. what a waste.
so that's my initial list of complaints/issues/etc with BZ4+RAPT, and i havent even actually brewed yet. just played with temp calibration, created text alerts, and explored the "app" as they call it.
if anyone else has other bugs/questions/issues/etc lets get them all together here. maybe once it gets long enough they'll take a look and fix things.
the marketing of BZ4+RAPT led me to believe there was much more in the way of instant, easy, mobile-friendly control coming in the package than what i've seen in my limited time with the unit.
i'll start with the biggest thing i thought was oversold/BS'd :
1-- the marketing seemed to say that using RAPT with the BZ4 would enable alerts to generated for you with the new wifi access. however the "alert" you get is ..... an email. not a text, or a phone notification, alarm, etc. an email. good for record keeping i guess, but as a time-sensitive message? nerp. (I've solved this issue, and now get text messages. happy to share the fix)
2- the celsius /fahrenheit changes dont stick in RAPT. also noted in the main BZ4 thread. rapt will convert to F. but the next time you look it might be showing you numbers in C, but it still says F. i kept getting my 150f cleaning temp target going back and forth between 150F and 65F. then back to 150F. then 65F. annoying.
3- the profiles you create on RAPT for BZ4 have multiple steps you can program, and you can also set those (email) alerts. but for some reason when you open up a profile you've saved earlier it doesnt show you the alerts. i've gone in and played with it a bunch. i dont see anything that shows when an alert is present/saved as a step in the profile. not sure why that isnt viewable with the rest of the steps. seems kind of important?
4- the mobile app doesnt appear to be an actual app. for reference, im on iPhone SE (2nd) and iOS 16. i used app store, downloaded RAPT and it took me to what appeared to be the regular app.rapt.io web portal. huh, ok. i searched around, saw a link to the Gen 4 instruction manual, and clicked. it popped up, but i i ended up having to hard close the "app" as there was no actual navigation button or other way to go "back" or close the document. WTF. so i try again, and as im going through and playing in the portal i realize its not really an app like you normally think of an app. it seems like its just a shortcut/link to the web portal. after eating lunch and going back in to play around some more i realized i couldn't find the app on my phone. i looked and looked, nothing. checked the "utilities" widget that has three apps inside of it, no luck. thinking i might have done something wrong, i went back to app store and was going to download it again. except that i couldnt. the app store button said "open" on app store, not "get". so yes, i had the "app" on my phone. but there's no button on my home screens. whenever i wanted to open it i had to go to app store to get the "open" button as it didnt exist on my phone with a normal button/widget on my home screens. so to sum it all up: not an "app" with its own environment, just a glorified hotlink to the web portal. and doesnt even save to your phone, had to keep going to app store to use it. what a waste.
so that's my initial list of complaints/issues/etc with BZ4+RAPT, and i havent even actually brewed yet. just played with temp calibration, created text alerts, and explored the "app" as they call it.
if anyone else has other bugs/questions/issues/etc lets get them all together here. maybe once it gets long enough they'll take a look and fix things.
