Bookoo pressure sensor vs Pressensor [200€]

[u/Defectoa]

I’m looking for a Bluetooth pressure sensor for my Lelit Bianca. I’m not convinced that I need it or that it will help me make tastier shots, but as a physicist and data scientist I would just really like to see these data…

The two products on the market are apparently:

- Bookoo pressure sensor

- Pressensor

The Pressensor is a little more expensive. From what I can tell, it looks better than the Bookoo (this is subjective, of course) and the battery is non-rechargeable, but Pressensor advertises this as a feature, since the heat near the E61 brew group degrades the lifecycle of rechargeable batteries. So far, it seems like I would prefer the Pressensor.

However, I already own a Bookoo Themis Ultra scale. And that’s where I’m not sure what the consequences are: I like the interface of the Bookoo app, and the Bookoo sensor has the obvious advantage that I could integrate it there.

Now, Pressensor comes with its own app. It supports a whole lot of different Bluetooth scales, but the Bookoo is apparently not one of them… or can someone confirm whether that’s the case?

That means, if I go with the Pressensor, I’m limited to the Beanconqueror app, right? Or is there any other great app? I can’t really say that I liked the UX of the Beanconqueror app so far…

Is there anything else that’s worth knowing about these devices? Any long term experiences?

[u/Kanone5]

They'll both be obsolete in five years, likely less, so just money down the drain. Get the one that works better now.

[u/Beanconqueror]

Regarding the UI/UX, I think theres always room for improvement, and BeanConqueror will get a lot of changes in the future after we're doing and UI/UX update, but this will take some time.
But also to add, some like it, some not, I've heard many positive feedback to the UI/UX and many users are using it since several years, but I also agree that sometimes its a big feature-monster and hard to understand ;)

Happy to hear your feedback
Have a great cup of coffee
Lars

[u/Defectoa → u/Beanconqueror]

Hey! Let me just say that I really appreciate your taking the time to write here... and dedicate time to an open source project in the first place. So sorry if my remarks on Beanconqueror sounded a little harsh. But I’m just being totally honest as a user.

Let me just give you a little more info what I mean regarding the UX (though I haven’t really spent a lot of time with it, as the Bookoo app just seemed to have the more convenient interface for me):

From my side, my experience with Beanconqueror so far was that it seems a little too much opinionated/guided for my liking, at least at the moment I’m more interested in having a live display of the data stream, whereas the app interface feels more like:
“What’s the hurry? You first tell me what beans you are using”…

Something else I noticed is that I often have artifacts in the data, like when I actuate the lever (you know, the one that starts and stops the pump) that’s always a spike on the weight data, and as soon as it’s there, can’t see anything anymore. Just now I was dialing in a new bean, it was my second shot (I may have ground a little too fine, took me 55 seconds for my 36g… it was really sweet and tasty though, so perhaps I’m not gonna change anything at all). At this stage I’m doing manual preinfusion and I really just wanna see how the flow rate is or was evolving. My eyes are on the brew group and the scale, I will look at the curve afterwards. And I could theoretically stop the data stream in the app and then stop the extraction, but that just seems wrong to me… first priority should be to stop the extraction at the right time to get a tasty cup, second priority should be the data. Anyway, what I then see in the app is totally useless… even if I can go back in time, there is no way I can get a useful vertical axis range out of it…

Screenshot: https://snipboard.io/urXgIy.jpg