Tilt

A Tilt talks to a phone over Bluetooth, and the Tilt app forwards what it hears to a URL of your choosing. Give it ours and the chart fills in.

Setting it up

1. In Beerwright, open Settings → Fermentation devices, press Add a device, and copy the device URL.
2. In the Tilt app on your phone, open the settings for logging and paste the URL into the Cloud URL field. On a TILTpi, the same field is in its logging configuration.
3. Leave the phone within Bluetooth range of the fermenter. The app posts at its logging interval, fifteen minutes by default, so the first reading takes that long to arrive.

The Tilt app can only forward what it hears. If the phone leaves the room, the readings stop until it comes back, and the gap shows on the chart.

A TiltBridge instead of a phone

If you would rather not leave a phone by the fermenter, a TiltBridge does the same job with no phone in it: a small box on your Wi-Fi that hears every Tilt in range and posts them itself. Paste the same device URL into its Generic Target entry, and several Tilts on the one bridge each become their own device here. The TiltBridge page has the steps and what happens when a second color turns up.

What it sends

The app posts the same flat record it writes to a Google Sheet: the gravity, the temperature, the Tilt’s color, the beer name and a timestamp. We read it whether the app sends it as JSON or a TILTpi sends it as a form, because both have reached us and the fields are identical.

The color is the device’s identity, since a Tilt is its color, so that is what we store as the device name.

Two things about the data

The temperature carries no unit. A Tilt reports in Fahrenheit, and the record does not say so. We read a temperature of 40 or more as Fahrenheit, which a fermenter never reaches in Celsius, and convert it.

The timestamp is not used. The Tilt app’s timepoint is a spreadsheet serial date in the phone’s local time, with no zone attached, so it cannot be placed on a clock without knowing where the phone was. We stamp each reading when it arrives instead. A point worth having is a point within a minute; a point silently placed in the wrong hour is worse than none.

When nothing arrives

No readings yet, ten minutes in. The app posts at its logging interval, fifteen minutes by default. Wait one interval, then check the device list in Settings, which says when each device last reported.

Readings stop overnight. The phone went out of Bluetooth range, or it went to sleep and the Tilt app with it. Keep the phone plugged in and within a room of the fermenter, and check the app’s own logging screen is still on. A TILTpi beside the fermenter is the fix for a phone that has other places to be.

Gaps in the chart. A gravity outside 0.980 to 1.200 or a temperature outside −10 to 60 °C is charted as a gap rather than a point, which is usually the Tilt reporting through a thick krausen or sitting against the fermenter wall. Give it a nudge and the points come back.

Readings on the wrong batch. With two fermenters, pin each Tilt to its batch with Readings go to in Settings. The devices page covers moving the ones that already went astray.

Related

• TiltBridge, for running your Tilts without a phone, and for several of them on one URL.
• Fermentation devices, for where readings land and fixing the wrong batch.
• Anything that can post JSON, for what comes back from the endpoint.