James has revisited the topic of scales and done a massive roundup of both Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth coffee scales.
Of the app enabled scales, only Acaia, our Half Decent and BooKoo were reviewed.
James expressed at length that he thought Acaia was far too expensive, only for people for whom $250 was not a meaningful expenditure. Which leaves just us and Bookoo: a company I'm quite happy to be in the same bucket with as I admire both their products and them as people.
James indicated that he was not interested in apps, so that major differentiator did not come up.
However, James did say that it is becoming increasingly common for stop at wait to be available on your espresso machine. That's quite helpful for our espresso machine sales, since I think only a handful of machines (DE1, Meticulous, Wendoughee, LM Linea) are able to do that. Normalizing stop-at-weight as a feature you should expect will remove quite a lot of espresso machines off a prospective buyer's list.
Our half decent scale didn't get much said about it, but that's probably because it worked fine, was reasonably fast and accurate. He didn't have any gripes about it like he did with a few other scales. And of course, he's not interested in software, which is the major differentiator of our scale, being open source and multi-app supporting.
Our scale did fairly well on responsiveness:
The big shocker here is how slow the Acaia is, perhaps because of the 0.01 gram accuracy, which is likely not needed in most use cases.
In the video there was an extended section about mechanical versus capacitive touch buttons, with most scales using capacitive touch. James rightfully talks about false taps caused by spraying, especially channeling in espresso. Our scale has had a problem with that, just like a lot of other capacitive touch scales do.
In recent firmware, we finally seem to have permanently fixed that by only registering touches to the buttons when we also sense a disturbance to the weighing of the scale. Since a finger causes the load cell to sense a weight, that's a way to tell whether a water drip is touching a button or a finger is.