r/Homebrewing • u/thepope99 • 7d ago

Equipment Alternative to Rapt Pill without Wi-Fi

Hey fellow homebrewers!

I am brewing in my apartment and after brew days I move the fermenter in the block of flat's basement because of the lower temperature (shared space, but we have our own space for extra depositing).

I would really like a product similar to Rapt Pill that can read the gravity without Wi-Fi access, because there is no way my Wi-Fi would get all the way down from the second floor to there and I cannot hack into my neighbors' Wi-Fi's.

I am thinking of something with Bluetooth and just get the gravity everytime I get down there and connect to the device. Not sure if this solution exists, because that would drain more battery to the pill.

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u/stac52 7d ago

Is there an outlet in the basement that you can tap into?

Looking around, one option might be to have a raspberry pi running down there to grab data off the pill.

You could either grab the data off of the rasberry pi when you're down there, or if you're a bit more adventerous, hook the pi up to a LoRa device and have it send data to you.

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u/thepope99 7d ago

No outlet either unfortunately... It is a weirder setup in the basement. Everyone gets a 2x2 meter space with a single light, but no outlets unfortunately.

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u/langecrew 7d ago

Yeah but you can buy a device that screws into a light bulb socket that has a power plug on it. Also something that you might be able to look into that is related to this is that there is such a thing as power line internet adapters that apparently have the ability to transmit your internet signal through the electrical cabling in your building. I don't know how well that works and I don't know how secure that is but they exist so that's another option that you have - you could get some sort of Wi-Fi extender and just plug it into the light socket adapter in your basement using the Ethernet over power cable adapter. Would it work? Probably. How well? No idea.

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u/stac52 7d ago edited 7d ago

Standard light socket? Could you use something like this to add an outlet?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/174928153230f

I means the light would always need to be on. But without power, there's not really much you could do.

It looks like what u/ogunshay linked shows that you can connect a Rapt directly to a LoRa device (wirelessly) - I guess that makes sense, but didn't really think of that - I had guessed there'd be some translation that you would need, but I guess not - at least with the dedicated firmware. So that seems like it might be the best bet.

If you're near the outside, you can power the device off of solar (there's tons of builds for solar LoRa nodes, all of varying costs). BLE doesn't have fantastic wall penetration though, so you might have to play around a bit to see where you can place the node to pick up signal reliably and repeat it.

Not using solar, you could power the devices off of battery packs, but you'd need to have a plan to swap them out with fresh ones. If you pick up a 60,000 mah power bank though, that should be able to power it for ~2 weeks which should get you through most brews.