Awesome stuff but be careful when working with boilers/pressurized containers - these things can result in no joke burns / explosions. Also, if you have mostly done low voltage electronics hacking, you might be missing some safety habits required in working with 120V/220V devices. Don't let this stop you, but don't rush the process :)
This looks really cool! But rather than building from scratch or making extensive hardware modifications, it makes me wonder if anyone has tried developing open-source firmware for <i>existing</i> espresso machines?<p>I have a Delonghi bean-to-cup machine. It's quite capable of making decent coffee but also has some unfortunate software behaviours that result in inconsistent output. Most annoyingly, it gives extremely limited control over grind time and thus the quantity of grounds in each shot. If the hopper runs out of beans or you switch to a different type of beans, it gets confused and tries to adjust the grind time on it's own, usually overcompensating and resulting in either too much coffee in the shot (pump struggles to express anything) or too little (thin, bitter, over-extracted shot).<p>If I could control grind time precicely, it would hugely improve the consistency my coffee. I could set up a profile for each type of bean that I use and fine-tune my shots.<p>Has anyone tried to hack or customise software on Delonghi (or any other) bean-to-cup machine? Any projects out there to do this?
I love my coffee and spend way too much money on espresso equipment - my setup is perfect.<p>I like these threads a lot, but dream of the open source bread maker for sourdough bread. I’ve been collecting bread makers from junk stores and have a fleet of ESPs. I have no idea what I’m doing but it’s getting dangerously close to having to do it myself.
For those interested in the subject, James Hoffmann's video on the ZPM espresso machine may be interesting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKA2COJRt6M">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKA2COJRt6M</a><p>To summarize, the ZPM was sort of a DIY espresso machine that turned into a kickstarter project to deliver a product. It ended up failing, but the effort informed a lot of stuff that came after.
It's mentioned in the article, but the Gaggiuino project is a really nice base if you like tinkering with this kind of stuff. You start with the chassis and components of an existing machine, and just add temperature, pressure and/or flow control.
This is probably a dumb question but what makes plastics or metals food grade?<p>I ask because I want to know if DIYing kitchen gadgets like this is somehow unsafe or is it possible to build food grade gadgets yourself?
I was expecting this to be about mugsy, the open source coffee maker I kickstarter backed in 2018. Unfortunately the rabbit hole there is the endless stream of very positive enhancement updates to a product that is shipping _in the next few days_ for the last 5 years.<p>Like, cmon man, just admit defeat.<p>Rant over. Yes, I’m bitter.<p>Edit: to be clear, it’s not the product I want anymore. I just need closure.
I build a fully automated 5g reflux still at the outset of the pandemic.<p>Beyond the initial charge of the boiler, swapping jars and cleanup, everything was automated. I even had a load cell to pause the boiler when either the jar was removed or reached a certain weight so that was ready for a robot arm or belt.<p>It's an extremely rewarding process to automate a physical plant like that because so many things can go wrong and there are so many edge cases, weird feedback loops and idiosyncracies of equipment that isn't obvious until you try it with another thing. I used nodered on a raspberry pi for all of the brains, mqtt for coordination and a swarm of nodeedu running tasmota for all of the I/O.<p>The main challenge is not getting too comfortable and starting to take shortcuts with safety. Pressure vessels, high voltage switching, fumes and flammable gases/liquids can ruin your day.
Whenever I stumble on the DIYs for "automatic" Espresso machines, I always wonder if the manual machines (think La Pavoni or Olympia) are not just simpler to use for controlling pressure.<p>Obviously, then you're still missing temp control. I guess I just like more simple stuff
For anyone interested in this sort of thing (like me), the Decent DE1 Espresso machine is a well-engineered, cafe quality, open-source machine that you can buy.<p>There is a small community working on various software apps around it. The machine is controlled through open BLE comms. All the control software AFAIK is OSS and tinkerable. The machine itself is top notch, and in my espresso-nerd opinion, beats anything on the market except in appearance and "analogeness".<p>So if you like espresso and hacking on software, check it out.
It is not very clear what in the processes of the coffee machine is closed source.<p>And it is not very clear why disassemble the coffee machine to assemble another coffee machine that is no different from other coffee machines.<p>It's all definitely funny. But it's not entirely clear why.
Doesn't look like it is actually open source, given:<p>> Or you could do what Norm Sohl did and build a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans <i>and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia.</i><p>(My emphasis)
What would be even more delicious is if people could be bothered to use the search function on HN prior to posting....<p>Original post, 120 comments, here ... <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35320729" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35320729</a>
Re-post, 4 comments, here ... <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35347638" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35347638</a>