Looks like Picobrew is auctioning off most of not all of their warehouse contents.
They were already in receivership (supposedly selling to an investor). Now this. Doesn’t seem like a good sign for the future for us Picobrew owners.
On top of the above, they have recently introduced via firmware update very stripped down manual and offline modes that essentially de-automate the machine. Yuck. I guess technically the Z won’t be bricked if they go out of business but it will take a few hundred button presses and hours standing beside the machine to brew a batch.
Anyone want to take a gamble on 15 pallets of malt?
Rough go for picobrew, but hard to compete with all the great electric and small batch systems. If an investor bought it they’re probably outsourcing manufacturing and cutting out unprofitable sections, which might have been the consumer side.
I see the wiz kids over at HBT are devising a workaround plan to at least run the machines. Hopefully, these guys will cobble something together y’all can use. I know they came at a premium price so to have to stand there and babysit the things would be a pisser.
I thought after all these years DIY people would be wary of vendor lock-in. Hopefully the manual mode is useful enough. Full Urinated brewing isn’t a big deal to me, so if it could hold temps and step mash, that would be plenty.
In the Automated Brewing Forum, PicoBrew Pico users thread, post 2335 and beyond:
Knightshade
“Friend of mine captured traffic from beginning to end of a PicoPak brew (Turning on, obtaining DHCP address, etc. to End Brew.) Pico traffic is in the clear (port 80) and provides only a smidge more detail than the raw data log you can get via your Brewhouse portal. There doesn’t appear to be any type of auth mechanism, at least not in the traffic itself. Anticipate that the UID is associated with your account on a backend database, which is how YOUR portal shows what you’ve done w/your machine.”
“… Might be worth trying to spoof the site locally and see what happens. I’ll see if I can try this over the weekend.”
Lbsrouf
“is the dump available somewhere like pastebin github or elsewhere? He can obfuscate the UUIDs, as long as we know the field length. I could work on a fake server locally someone could run and track progress. Thinking of raspberry pi. A zero W, creates a Wi-Fi hotspot and redirects onto itself the picobrew.com traffic”
I don’t really know the difference in the products and their output. …but hopefully, the entire spectrum of products will benefit from an effort to ‘break’ the code of one.
If I understand this right, the picobrew reads a chip/RFID in the picopacks, sends a code to server, and the server sends the instruction to the machine?
Full urinated brewing is a good reason to cut back on drinking when brewing.
Use a Picobrew supplied pack. In this case a code or the name of the recipe is used to tell the brewer what to do.
With your own ingredients. Create a recipe on their site. The recipe is downloaded by the brewer and execute with your ingredients.
I have only ever done #2. That is what I am worried about loosing.
Picobrew is fully automated. I setup the brewer (30 minutes) and the leave for 5 hours. I comeback chill, rack to fermenter, and clean (30-40 minutes).
If I am going to manual brew I can just BIAB. It would be easier than Picobrew’s manual brew.
My first thoughts went to Annie when reading about this. A great brewer and wonderful person…I have a tin tacker for her “Mow The Damn Lawn” light lager on my garage brew fridge that she gave me. Glad to hear she is ok.
Just bumped into this thread - funny timing. I had emailed Annie Johnson at PicoBrew yesterday with a question regarding her 2017 Homebrew Con “Czech Plz” presentation. I’d just viewed her presentation after seeing a post where Denny Conn had mentioned it. Would anyone have a suggestion for how one might now get in touch with her? - Would still like her personal input on my question if possible. Thanks.
There’s a Facebook group now dedicated to hacking these devices. They still work for now but people expect the website to go offline soon. No idea when. The new owners have not announced anything. Not sure why they have left the website up this long.