BIABrewer.info

Title says it all. Just a thought that is on my mind these days....

I feel like it will be a christmas gift when the BIABacus is finalised. The little details when they are revealed sound awesome. I use the calcualtor with good success and knowing there is somrthing else that will be updated and better is exciting.

Anyone else as optimistic as I am?

Squared,we are all on the edge of our seats.Everytime it looks good,someone finds a glitch and it sets things back,however all of these glitches are only going to make it better.Everyone is committed to releasing this version as close to perfect as possible.I am not sure about Xmas gifts but maybe the Easter Bunny?

Thanks for starting this thread Squared. I have taken the liberty of making it a poll as well. Hopefully that is okay with you .

I'm glad you have been keeping an eye on the little details. I think anyone working on the BIABacus project appreciates this.

Hopefully you also don't mind me using this thread to occasionally provide updates. The good news is that all the, "in-built intelligence," we want to provide has been thought through almost fully and much of it we have been able to implement in spreadsheet form.

The spreadsheet form is incredibly limiting and difficult, programming-wise, though as you'll know if you caught my last update here in another thread.

The overall aim is to get the BIABacus written on a platform that can be available to all users. As this will require many hundreds of programming hours, our main thinking at the moment is, "What's the best strategy to get something really good to as many users as possible in the shortest time?"

In other words, whatever we come up with in the short-term will not be accessible to everyone and will not include some 'obvious' but non-critical things which are simply too hard to write in a spreadsheet format.

For those that will be able to use the 'stop-gap' version, they will find the following...

1. New users: Software that is very hard to get mis-use and get wrong answers from as well as an extremely educational tool. (Some obvious, non-critical things found in nearly all other software will be missing and this may lead to them over-looking the power of the BIABacus.)

2. Experienced Users: Experienced brewers should be able to overlook the things that are missing and recognise the powerful features unseen before in any other software. (The 'intelligence' of the BIABacus will not be automatically obvious on a first look so may well be over-looked by experienced users.)

The things in brackets above need to be minimised as much as possible and this will require more thinking and care. In my next life, I am going to come back as a BIABacus .

Thanks Squared,
Pat

The current calculator has taught me a lot since first joining this site. So the new one is gonna be awesome from what I hear. VERY excited. We owe a huge debt of gratitude for those masters that develop this. THANKS

sorry to revive an old thread here but I feel this post belongs most here. It's interesting to see some things here. Mostly I have been "lurking" and just trying to suck up data and make an informed decision on where to go next in this hobby. I have bugged around with the calculator both the Maxibiab/The calculator. Both of them don't work for me in my unusual situation. I don't have any windows machine and I run off of linux. Sure I have Libreoffice calc which might work less well than open office which I have yet to try. The macros are all messed up for me, and I'm American and therefore am used to this horrific measurement system. I did try and go through and convert all my stuff to metric using google.com which was easy, albeit time consuming. I have no problem using metric, as it's so much better, but it would be nice if I could switch stuff over to American measurements. There is the option in one of the calculator versions I have, the maxicalc. It however does not work for me and I get a runtime error, probably because of using it on linux.

I see that the BIABacus rumors to be within 6 months of completion. This is taken with a speculation to myself as I have seen development lasting more than 2 years now. I would hope the developers could take lession from development programs like Ubuntu or even firefox and release early copies. It sure is hard to skim through all the reports you would get from all the users, and yes developers trouble shooting and ideas are probably easier on the enginners of the program. But, I would have to say having that kind of feedback and trial by fire would really help the development move along. A goal of a new minor version every 2-6 months or so would keep features rolling in or calculations being updated. The BIAB movment needs new members and to get them I think making this whole website and calculator easier to use. What ever version the few people that get to use the BIABacus right now has to work at least somewhat better than the calculator spreadsheets we have. They are not very intuitive to the average person in my opinion and require an awful lot of reading through the fourms. A better feeling of saftey and confidence in ingreedient purchasing and brew day time allocation would be grounds for getting a whole bunch of people into BIAB. I think with a calculator available that is easy to work with would be the biggest thing this website could do. As new people started the types of kettles easily available and types of setups that people will tend to fit into based off of local availabilty of products would lend itself easily to a development of profile conversions. I could see a program where you enter a recipe with all neccessary variables and press a button to convert it to common settups. Just getting ot see that would have influenced the purchases I would make in equipment to get started. It would even help for people that already had eqipment as they would be just a button away instead of spreadsheet data entering. I just really hope for something more user friendly soon so I can try to get more of my peers started over a hurdle of information that is too daunting to some people. I have friends that don't want to give this method a go just because the information is too hard to compile. Call them lazy but they are a voice that goes unheard because they don't even sign up and post here to tell you guys what they think this site needs. The few who do get here already did enough work that figureing out the calculator or giving it a go is a much more viable option.

Sorry for the long winded message hopefully it's coherent and not too terrible of grammar and spelling mistakes. I'll edit it later, I've had a few homebrews in me at the time of writing. I'll probably be trying my first biab with a hefe within the next few days.

Great post kartoffel ,

Give me a day or so and I'll write a proper reply. A few things have happened in the last few weeks that should allow an adequate solution to the above fairly quickly.

Many thanks for taking the time to write the above,
Pat

I must say that I am very excited about the proposed BIABacus.

I am really a big picture guy and struggle with most of the fine points of computers, spreadsheets, calculations, the various efficiencies, what figures go where on the calculator, etc., etc,. etc.. Im really looking forward to a program that can help me understand the brewing process better, and will allow me to brew better beer.

I currently don't use the Calculator though I have in the past. All I think of when i open it up is AHH! TO MUCH INFORMATION! For me, working with the Calculator makes my brewing experience less fun? Also, while the system of measurement we have in the US is cumbersome, it is what I know. The calculator is in metric.

As a data-phobe I really like the appearance of "Brew Mate". Its clean and does not cause my blood pressure to rise when I look at it, but while it is said to have BIAB capability, I cant figure it out.

Im happy to provide some compensation to those who are had at work on this, did I miss an opportunity to do that?

So yes, I am VERY excited about BIABacus, and if I can work it, anyone will be able to.

Trout

Thank you for your interest in the BIABacus and your patience

My apologies that I won't address every facet of what has been posted above as I am hoping that the following will answer most questions. If it doesn't however, please feel free to ask your questions here.

Here is my current thinking on what we will do...



We, at BIABrewer.info, know exactly what we want to see here but we don't have the resources to make it happen quickly. For example, even if 50 members committed $10 a week, I now suspect it would still take a year to see anything remarkable. This money would have to be spent on one developer/programmer to allow them to focus completely on the project and even then they'd be getting a poor hourly rate and be getting backed up by other people who get paid nothing at all. And, if the main developer dropped dead, then I would have to spend around three months at about four hours a day, just getting a new developer up to speed before they could even start any real work.

Obviously, this is not practical.



Several exciting things have been happening over the last few months, let alone the last few years . We could wait and present them in the perfect form we have spent so long devising or we can give them to you now in quite a good format but it will have some limitations. Here's what I have in mind...

A Complete Forum Re-Write

Someone asked about two months ago for a terminology/definitions thread. We have worked hard on this and come up with something quite nice. The next problem was that we couldn't post it as the current calculator's terminology and most of BIABrewer.info Essentials would not match.

PistolPatch, who made the original calculator, like us, has been desperate to see the calculator improved and has now undertaken the task of re-writing it. The progress on this new calculator made in just the last few weeks makes us think that we can actually call this something like the "Pre-BIABacus" rather than a new temporary calculator.

This, "Pre-BIABacus", is very tedious to write as it now aims to put all the ideas and developments made in the last two years into a spreadsheet that can be used by anyone regardless of their platform.

For example, a simple formula that tells you how high to fill your kettle, instead of being x x y, in this new "Pre-BIABAcus" is =IF(AND(ISNUMBER(CP34),$AU$15>0),(CP34-$DS$61)*1000/(PI()*(($AU$15/2)^2))+$DS$64,"") as it does a lot more than you'd think.

The auto-efficiency feature of the "Pre-BIABacus" will take into consideration things we never even thought of until the last few weeks and will require statements that are way more complex and convoluted than the above.

Each section of the "Pre-BIABacus" will hyperlink to full instructions on the forum and I will have to write these and then ask NME (Admin) to time-stamp them so as they appear in the right order on the forum.

Once the Above is Done

I think doing the above will be excellent for brewers. The biggest strength and weakness of the above will be the 'Pre-BIABacus'. It will be very powerful. It will also be somewhat intuitive but nowhere near as much as we would have liked. Despite this, I still think it will be easier to understand than other programs and have a very low risk of a new user being able to make major errors.

It certainly will have what we think are critical features never seen before in any software.

What Doing the Above Will Cost

Doing the above costs or, at best, delays the chance of being able to financially reward those who have either already put in hundreds to thousands of hours on this project or those that will in the future. This, for me, is not what I had wanted.

Doing the above will also cost the site. For example, posting up a recipe will require posting up the whole 'Pre-BIABacus' file rather than just the 10 KB one we had planned.

We also had a good plan for the BIABacus so that new users would get a heap of stuff for free and advanced/experienced users could happily pay. Going the above route obliterates all this unfortunately.

What You Can Do

1. Keep posting and always post quality or humour/encouragement.

2. We'll put a copyright on anything we post up that is important. It will just ask for acknowledgement. If you find anyone breaching the copyright, do your best to make it known. (There are already some people out there who have capitalised on the hard work by BIABrewer.info members or founders and failed to give any acknowledgement )

3. As for donations, I previously hoped that we would be able to give a special reward to anyone who donates. With the above change in plan, I can't see this happening soon which is quite a disappointment. I know those who have donated to date have done so without expectation of a reward but it would still be great to give something back to you one of these days.

4. If you have some free time/skills, there's a lot we still need to get done here. We have projects from bag porosity through to php. Please PM me if you think you can help.

That's the best answer I think I can manage for now.

Thanks again,
Pat

Wow, I hope this really makes people appreciate what is going into this project instead of it being like a black box. The only think I worry about is a situation like "black mesa source" which was a project to recreate the whole entire half life 1 game in the new source engine. That largly failed and developers put 1000s of hours in only to have a project die in the water. I would hate to see all this work go to waist. I'll be here for the long haul. Unfortunatley I don't think I can be of much help as I have no computer science background whatsoever, however I'm really good with numbers. I supose the least I could do is help with actual numbers when I do my brews to compare to these new formulas you guys have to come up with. It's interesting to see all the things you have to think of to make a fully encompasing project. I supose it's too far along to try to release a biabacus in simplified form with generic calculations that are say 90% correct or something and then move development to include refinements. Kind of like how the theory of relativity is better at explaining the universe than Newtons calculation's for gravity, but newtons numbers work great for everything except getting a rover to mars.