There are folks who believe that their initial purchase funds upgrades in perpetuity. Which is why a number of software companies have gone over to a subscription model instead of “selling” the software. In the cold light of day, the developers can’t continue to work for free especially when new features require more work than bug fixes.
I don’t know the cost/break even per unit for a Bullet and the return on R&D for the project as a whole but I would be willing to contribute something towards the ongoing software development costs in lieu of it quietly petering out. I suspect those for whom the Bullet is a source of actual income might also. Or maybe not. I think from reading between the lines, that the new power boards for V2 for 110v may in part be delayed by the trepidation of unleashing a bunch of support tickets when people install them who have little or no working knowledge of electronics. I suspect the support load increased a fair amount when the IBTS was made available as a user install kit.
I’m grateful to the Aillio team for keeping our current machines up to date on hardware and firmware and understand that comes at a cost beyond just the price of the kit. I don’t want them to walk away from that.
Sorry for the ramble, I for one, as many others, don’t want to be just beating on Aillio - we all want them to crush the competition and the new Behmor 1Kg roaster may well cause ripples if nothing else because of their US based support and general reputation in that area. I had a Behmor 1600 at some point in my journey, needed help with hardware and they were excellent to work with.
For me, focus on one Source of Truth for releases, release notes, trouble ticket entry, etc should be the first priority. I don’t see why with Roast.World here and running, external sites like Trello (nice and pretty as it may be) are needed to be kept in sync. Then maybe with Patreon or some similar kind of support we can provide some additional money in the pot for development. Marko over at Artisan works in this way - not sure how much beer money gets to him for people using his “free” software but I have donated a couple of times just as a home hobbyist because I see behind the curtain, working in the software world. I mean most hobbies come at a cost of enjoyment right ?
Dang, rambled on even more. Chime in with your thoughts gents.
@stuartmcknight - Good points about a revenue stream for Aillio to provide the kind of support that will be needed to grow the business.
I believe that Marko and team (Artisan software) have a fair amount of corporate customers that pay them in addition to home roasters. They also have the new fee-based Artisan Plus inventory management software that (if successful) could yield additional income from businesses.
Aillio is the “youngster on the block” in the roaster business. They still have things to learn about how they are running the business and support model. I am OK with the concept of additional income to fund better support for the software side of the business. If a fee-based support model would yield exceptional support, Aillio should explore that idea IMO.
I know there are those that like “free everything”. But, for those of us that have run/managed business operations, we know that effective support often needs the associated income than extends beyond the product sale revenues. This is especially true for a smaller company that doesn’t have huge volumes of product sales (yet).
Right you are. I think we all want to see success and growth in the brand. We may not get bragging rights for being first adopters, but we’re close. A year from now, their success will be our success.
Btw, I donated to Artisan as well. I was using it exclusively with my HotTop. It was a little quirky and it had control features I would never use, but I was happy enough to ante up $$.
I think I may be to the point with the Bullet and RT that, if I must, I can do what I need to do and just ignore the RT limitations if I have to. They’re pretty close. Well… other than that %&&^ jitter! I have at least 2 versions of RT that ‘get it done’ for me. And, since I don’t roast 1 kilo loads, I can slide along till the V2 power board shows up and you guys get the bugs worked out… I want to slide home without leaving a skid mark!!
Btw, I believe you’re right that the IBTS mod kit must have left Aillio a little bruised. When I finally dug deep enough to realize what owners had to do and the support needed, I was a little shocked. There are surely lab techs among us, but I suspect the mass of owners earn their living another way and just want a good cup of coffee. Or just want to keep their customers coming back!
@stuartmcknight, I’ve kind of been thinking along the same lines recently as I’ve kept up with the goings on here, on the Facebook group and with what we’ve heard from the folks at Aillio directly.
In fact, running some quick math in my head, I’m thinking that with maybe 3,000 units (and I bet that number is high) in the field multiplied by Aillio’s cut of $2700US, less hardware cost, divided by the (admittedly) small number of staff and the length of time they’ve been working on this product comes out to…well, I’m impressed we have everything we do, much less that there’s still effort being put into new features and updates.
I’m rooting for the team at Aillio and happy to be on the ride with them (and everyone here.) I’m not sure I see a path to getting all the new features we (and they) want to deliver along with the support experience we and future customers may want without changing the pricing model. I, too, would be okay with that.
Please any help here. I just upgraded to RT 2.5 beta. There is now an option to change the colors for the Drum (IBTS), Bean probe, Exit Temperature and ROR. I don’t have a probe for exit temp so this is not needed. The problem that I have is that I roast using the light background option and the default ROR curve color is almost white. I can barely see it. In the settings section there is an option to change the color but every time I select a new color for ROR and hit update nothing happens. I am stuck with an invisible ROR curve. I tried reinstalling RT 2.4 beta but that did not work. Help! I am using Windows 10 and installed the win32-x64-prod-v2.5.0-beta file
@pnrenton - You may hafta use the wipe of the Aillio and RoasTime folders that Jacob once suggested in the past. I think that @bab just had to do that to get back to a previous version of RT after getting stuck in a 2.4.4. release of RT. Fyi, using the “wipe” will clear your locally saved roasts. but your cloud-saved roasts will still be there.
I don’t use any of these “buggy-betas” of RT because of this very thing. So, I can’t speak to what may be done to get 2.5.0 working. I’m on Artisan and don’t have this kind of stuff happening to me.
From what I’ve seen Marko doesn’t participate here and mainly hangs out in his own Github site for the Artisan software. I expect that you may be referring to the on-the-curve changes that are made to heat, fan, etc. Yes, that can get busy when changes are made within close proximity or other on-curve status indicators. I think that is why Artisan offers the option to display those things below the charted area so that they can be cleanly seen individually.
My perspective about RT is that Aillio really took a yeoman’s responsibility to even attempt to write their own Roasting software. Many roast manufacturers (that are many times larger) decided to just focus on their roasters and leave/recommend the software choice to companies like Artisan.
But Aillio is doing a poor job (as we all know) of telling people what changed in these “beta releases”. That puts using the releases as overly risky if the person is more focused on actually using the roaster vs being a guinea-pig. I’d love to be using Aillio’s RT software, and wouldn’t mind helping them test, but they are doing a poor job of managing the software changes.
I also think Aillio made a mistake (that other roast manufacturers don’t do) in making the user participate in the “cloud” just to have full use of the RT software’s capability. The user’s roast data belongs to them, not to Aillio. We should have the option of not posting all roasts to the cloud and still have the freedom to use all the analysis tools in RoasTime. Why Aillio can’t understand that fundamental thing frankly escapes me.
I’ve struggled with this. It’s easy enough to disconnect from the internet while using RT. The downside is you lose the integrated bean inventory which I find very useful.
I’ve been anti-social media from the git-go and here I am in a parallel environment I don’t feel comfortable with. [If you haven’t seen it, try watching Netflix’s documentary “The Great Hack”. Yikes!] I’m here because I trust Aillio, but the alternate FB offering is out.
I downloaded RT 2.5.0 for Mac. Seems to work fine, except the option of changing of the colors of the curves has a problem. In particular changing the color of the ROR does not work. As also mentioned by another user, this is rather awkward. Please solve asap.
I think the color was chosen as a default for the dark background. If you need to roast, you might try switching to that background till they get it sorted.
It is actually a bit worse though with the way Aillio put limitations on the complete use of RoasTime. Unless you are connected and willing to do their “cloud dance”, you don’t get the full use of post roast analysis, bean inventory, etc. It is poor form to tell customers (who paid several thousand dollars for your product) “oh sorry, but you can’t have full RT software function unless you roast our way”.
I hear ya about social-forcing-cones. Whenever possible I choose what roads I want to travel with people communications or software products. After this post, I’m going to stop talking about what Aillio needs to do (unless I need them for warranty). Here in their own forum, I don’t see the level of acknowledgement or participation from them with the few people that are willing to help them.
The obvious things that you are encountering in these RT betas should be 1st caught by Aillio’s own testing. I question what kind of testing they are actually doing with the software when they don’t catch the obvious and leave it for users to find. They should also make the testing environment a 2-way street of engagement or they don’t deserve the help they are getting IMO.
Anyway, I’m not going to concern myself with it further. I’ll continue roasting using Artisan (which works well) and hope that Aillio one-day “wakes up and smells the ”
Blockquote I also think Aillio made a mistake (that other roast manufacturers don’t do) in making the user participate in the “cloud” just to have full use of the RT software’s capability
When we started designing the new RT we considered many different technologies and we talked to other people in the industry who makes roast software. A few of those companies are now fully web based and one need to be logged in and online to roast. Their market research showed that people do not want to install software… We thought that a bit extreme and went ahead with software which can be used standalone, offline - even though this requires a lot more resources to do.
Since RT 2.3.x we have a new logging system to help our supporters when a bullet has a problem and this is helping us tremendously to speed up support and make a correct diagnosis. Furthermore it helps us to improve both the bullet and the software so we can push the limits of what is possible.
So yes, we decided to leave some features on the cloud side of things where it made sense. If you are uncomfortable for whatever reason but you still want the benefits (learning from other roasters across the world) then you could sign up with an anonymous email / user name.
Lets list some benefits of logging into roast.world (some will come in the future)
The good:
Aillio has your data for cloud backup. If your PC fails you have all your profiles backed up
Access your profiles on different devices - not just one computer
Simultaneously see your roasting on different devices (future)
Sharing roast profiles with your friends
Easy to find your beans - saves you a lot of time
Find green bean vendors and maybe try some new coffees
Compare roasts of the same bean with others
Discuss roasting and profiles
Help other roast better coffee
Aillio can improve the bullet by analyzing how they run
Aillio can give better support by knowing the problems better
I am sure I forgot many more
The bad:
Aillio has your data
People can steal my roast profiles (if they know who you are)
I also wanted to jump in to let you know that we are here and we are listening and we are growing, too. These past few days we’ve been moving office to a much bigger (and nicer!) location in which we can spread our wings, so to speak. We’ve hired new staff in all departments – from engineers to coders to professional cuppers to customer support – with a mind to both improve support and also to push forward with what has made the brand special to begin with: innovation.
We know there are things we can do better (including beta release notes, which clearly got lost in the recent reshuffling) and we appreciate all the feedback we get from everyone for that reason. We’ve also been very responsive to that feedback. We began as a tiny company with a couple of employees trying to do something very unlike anyone else in the industry. We would never have made it on our own. Fortunately, we’ve been blessed with a community of early-adopting users who have been very supportive of our vision. The respect is mutual, and we’ve done everything we can to help our early adopters grow with us by offering our latest technology to them for very low prices, even if it requires a little technical expertise to install. As some of you mentioned, this choice comes with a cost, of course, but it is one we’re happy to absorb for these reasons.
That said, as evidenced by the new office move and additional staff, we’re definitely moving into a new era for the Bullet R1 and Aillio in general. We’re hyper-aware that our early adopter “coffee geek” customers are of a different mindset than some of our future customers. As both the number of customers and expectations for after-sales service begin to shift, we will need to devote more resources both to supporting newbies and to ensuring extremely stable platforms for our business-minded customers. And that’s exactly what we’re doing now.
This is a very long way of letting you know that we’re not resting on our laurels here in Taiwan. I think that’s going to become pretty obvious in the second half of 2019 once we begin to realize some of these new efficiencies. We will keep getting better.
@jacob your observations are in common with many other software companies. I’m not roasting wearing a tin foil hat to prevent mind control or loss of my profiling trade secrets .
Two observations - I’d appreciate an opportunity to mark a roast unpublished or private so that only I see it. Sometimes I have a roast that just well isn’t great and I’d hate for someone to waste their green finding and using it.
Second the sharing of profiles is to me at least a little obscure. I did it once downloading a profile for a bean I just got but I can’t recall now how. Also with the advent of the IBTS, I don’t think that gets reflected in the data for things like charge temp ?
Just to clarify a few things. The sole thing that I’m “uncomfortable” about with RoasTime is one thing. The decision by Aillio to prevent me from having full post-roast analysis unless I’m willing to roast online. I have no “protective” feelings and am not a “tin foil hat person”. I could care less if anyone knows what I roast or my blend components other than not wanting to have failed roasts placed into the public cloud. Also, “creating an anonymous email or user name” as you suggested doesn’t address anything about not having full post-roast analysis unless the user roasts on-line.
Having been in the mainframe computing industry for 44yrs and a coffee-roaster for 20yrs, I full well know the benefits of data gathering for product improvement. It is not a new concept. That is also not my concern about what Aillio is doing.
Your assumption that roasters wouldn’t mind that you purposely block post-roast analysis capability from locally (non-cloud) roasts is the problem. That was a mistaken assumption that really only serves the “everyone wants to roast in the cloud” justification.
I hear all of your positions. I just don’t agree with some of them. You have a customer, who instead of being given a simple option to have full use of RoasTime (whether online or offline), has to use 3rd party software just to have a fully functioning roasting tool. So, I’ll continue to provide support and money to “industry accepted” roasting software that got it right and gets that many coffee-roasters do like “full local control”. That control includes the software that they use to roast.
I think you are assuming that roast.world’s analyzer is a finished product. It isn’t – in fact Roast.World will be undergoing an overhaul because we know it could be much better in every way (See above post about additional hires.) The focus for Roast.World will be about sharing and pooling data and experiences in a way that makes it useful (and fun!) for everyone who logs in.
Perhaps you’re also assuming that RT2 is a finished product – it isn’t. The focus this year has been on RT2 – note: NOT roast.world – and we are continually adding new features to it, and customer feedback has played a big role in prioritizing those workflows. The first version of RT2 didn’t even include playback, or overlays. You can do both now. And now we also offer the ability to download roast profiles from RW and create ‘recipes’ based off time or temperature changes that can be played back automatically. If you only want to create recipes from your own profiles or from scratch, that is your choice.
At this point the only advantage the roast analyzer in Roast.World has over RT2’s latest beta,which includes post-roast overlays, is that you can overlay more than one profile post roast. In short, if the roast analyzer is the only thing that upsets you, then you probably don’t need to feel upset. The advantages of having cloud functionality are incredible and a great many people will be reaping them in the not-too-distant future, but whether you want to join them is ultimately your choice.
Thanks for that feedback, it touches on some of our office discussions, too. Roast.World and the way it interacts with RT2 is going to be a big focus in the latter half of 2019. I think it’s gonna be really cool.
I know that the “Error Log” tab can be misunderstood so I hope that RT and The Cloud might evolve for some remote level diagnostics when uploading roast profiles - so if someone raises an issue that their power suddenly went out (or rather P0 but the machine itself was running) there might be something tracked to indicate what and why (overheating induction coils etc). If you can get something like that up and running, I think it would be a great step.
As we’ve speculated in other forum posts, keeping new features funded from the original roaster purchase is tricky, so some of us (me at least) have indicated a willingness to try to contribute to keeping new features funded somehow, whether that be donation ware or some kind of recurring subscription. Leaving that out there because I for one know that there’s no free lunch and want to keep new features coming for the Bullet. If you are all in fact independently wealthy millionaires who want to philanthropically bestow new software and features on us, then I of course take that offer back
There are some things we/I might get a little grouchy about here (like having release notes for RT and R1 firmware) but deep down, that’s because we/I want you to succeed. Having a single point of information (manuals/FAQ/software) is I think one of the first things to address and if that’s going to be Roast.World.2.0 then great.
I have at least 2 versions of RT that ‘get it done’ for me. And, since I don’t roast 1 kilo loads, I can slide along till the V2 power board shows up and you guys get the bugs worked out… I want to slide home without leaving a skid mark!!
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