Recent content by cheesemonster

Also I think the glycol loss is from the HEX actually beginning to leak. It got worse for me as time went on. If I had a zymatic still I would replace the plate chiller. This is a pic of the one that was in my machine. I am sure you can find something equivalent.

Mike might know better as he has probably done this more recently, but from what I recall you need to have a Philips screw driver, and for the front there's nuts that are pretty far up to keep the machine top on to near the display. I think the nuts might be 5/16 or 3/8. I forget if you have to...

Refilling the glycol is a rather messy operation that requires a lot of disassembly. You have to be reasonably skilled at repair IMO. I did it to mine but I also have a lot of repair experience and worked as a professional repairing laboratory equipment which is pretty similar. I think for all...

Also people might want to consider NOT taking on any firmware upgrade they push from now on. It seems like this is very easy to replace the API so we wouldn't want someone to push a release that makes this harder. I don't think Picobrew really tried to mitigate this at all because they were in...

Nice work. I considered doing this as well. My fear was as you discussed in the blog post that they would not connect SSL to a MITM proxy or server without firmware modification... But it looks like it just took a self signed cert with no firmware mods? So just hijacking the DNS and presenting...

I am a developer. The images are broken for me on Chrome/Firefox on Mac OSX. The broken image links to https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/attachments/upload_2020-2-11_6-6-11-jpeg.666054/ This results in a page for me that says "You do not have permission to view this page or perform this...

As a developer I am wary of any device that has some cloud connection and zero fee. That means the company doesn't have an incentive or future suitors have an incentive to run it. We are in a world where full time engineers are getting paid a ton of money so for such a small pool of people like...

The absolute minimum they should do if they go under is open source their server side code and firmware. I am a developer, I'd support/create a project to maintain or enhance their code and run the server side services. We shouldn't have to reverse engineer the protocol and bin dump the...

As far as the Z reliability vs the Zymatic... I don't work for PicoBrew, and you can look at my history I have been critical of them. I opened the top of the Z and it appears from how they did it that it will be more resistant to failure. Nothing is failsafe. The major issues of the Zymatic...

The glycol pump always is on when the machine is turned on AFAIK. I know this because it becomes noisy when there's bubbles in the glycol and that noise starts immediately on power on. I scrapped my machine and sent the main board back for my rebate for Z1. One upgrade that you machine hackers...

I'd check the black inline filter too. As Buck said, the keg posts or connectors can sometimes get stuff in them and lessen flow. You can remove the top of the connectors with a flat head screwdriver. There's almost always stuff in there. The normal operation of the machine is the grain portion...

I usually run without the seal, and also the evaporation makes it come closer to the projected OG. Most of my brews don't foam very much and if they do it is only during the mashout phase. Yes the lower efficiency is a part of brewing with this but grain is really cheap and as you said...

Yeah I did last night too. They just want the main board sent back which means they are burying the machines pretty much as expected. This is pretty good of them as they have supported the Zymatic fully for 5 years, and obviously learned some things from it. You have to agree to recycle/destroy...

I've asked them several times and I always get the same response that they are "finalizing the details" I mean they always answer promptly and politely but I think they didn't consider the logistics or cost of this when they offered it. It is going to be hard for a small company to suddenly...