A coffee machine modder friend in the USA has built my rev2 board and sent me the bill of materials he used. This may give a head start to intrepid adventurers from the USA who are attempting the same.
Download it here. Note: this list was compiled before I decided that a metal oxide varistor is needed. See note 2 here.
My coffee machine controller is now open source. I have uploaded the firmware and hardware design to GitHub. This meant I needed a catchy name. I have always just called my controller “coffeepid”, which is pretty generic.
After a conversation with several coffee machine modder friends (thanks guys), I settled on “Hot Metal Brewbot”.
Do you need an explanation? Right then…
It’s a (delightfully bad) pun on the hot metal printing press and an espresso press. It also describes the thing we are controlling, i.e. the boiler. And I think it sounds kind of cool.
The name was already claimed by the HoTMetaL HTML editor but that is now defunct. Searching on GitHub, there are a few random projects using the name but nothing obviously popular and nothing related to coffee. And (if you share my dry sense of humour) this gives us another justification for the name: if a programming language can be named after an island where coffee is grown and a derivative of that language can become a standard adjunct to HTML, then why can’t a coffee machine controller be named after an HTML editor?
So there.
My coffee machine project has a new name, “Hot Metal Brewbot”. Read about that here. In the meantime, here is a Youtube video I made of the machine in action:
I have been surprised to find myself increasingly sad at the death of Prince Philip. This may seem odd as I never met him. So why am I sad? I have been pondering this and have identified four reasons. And what can I do about the sadness? Nothing – but I believe it will pass and I will settle into a hope founded in the Easter story which is, after all, the great surrounding narrative of the week in which Prince Philip died.
This year I have plated several parts of my coffee machine with zinc to prevent corrosion. This turns out to be surprisingly easy to do at home and I found I already had all the components I needed.
I have plated the bracket which holds the steam boiler in my Gaggia Baby Twin, the bolts which hold the boiler together and the bracket which holds the thermal fuse in place and also acts as a terminal for the earth wire onto the boiler.
Let’s suppose you’ve figured out a fab design for a temperature probe that could be mounted anywhere on the Gaggia boiler. What is the best placement for your probe? Two obvious considerations spring to mind:
I have not found it easy to design a cheap and reliable temperature probe which can easily be mounted on the Gaggia boiler. If you have a simple solution, I would love to hear about it.
Here I document my present probe design and an idea I have just had which is really simple and obvious to me since I built a 3D printer but wasn’t before.
There are also some notes at the end about types of devices which could be used for temperature probes and how to use them with the rev2 board.
The short version: Our present way of dealing with COVID-19 is insane1That’s not “insane” as a slur but “insane” as in an action no sane person would take after informed, considered reflection. Let’s not turn this into a personal dig against policy makers, though, who are under immense pressures from all directions. It’s more of a corporate insanity.. Of the only two sane approaches, both require intolerable levels of restrictions over a sustained period. In one approach these gradually scale back and COVID-19 kills a significant fraction of a year’s worth of normal deaths over about 6 months. In the other, the intolerable restrictions remain for an unknown period of more than 6 months and possibly years but COVID-19 kills almost no one. I would love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am. The choice before us sucks. Take your pick.
The longer explanation…
| ↑1 | That’s not “insane” as a slur but “insane” as in an action no sane person would take after informed, considered reflection. Let’s not turn this into a personal dig against policy makers, though, who are under immense pressures from all directions. It’s more of a corporate insanity. |
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Some time back I lived near Durham1For the sake of clarity, that’s just plain “Durham”, the ancient pilgrimage destination, rather than the Durham which always seems to have “North Carolina” appended to the name. where the water is blissfully soft. Five years of sparkly clean kettle and coffee machine that just don’t scale up! Since moving to a harder water area, I have often wanted to recapture those halcyon days. And now I think I may have…
I’ll spare you the long sob story about fruitless googling for simple effective answers to scale and jump to the solution I am now trialing: citric acid.
| ↑1 | For the sake of clarity, that’s just plain “Durham”, the ancient pilgrimage destination, rather than the Durham which always seems to have “North Carolina” appended to the name. |
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As expected, the UK government announced yesterday that the present “lockdown” restrictions would remain for the present. Nonetheless, it is becoming clear that now is a time when critical decisions must be made. No one can be certain when we will reach the “peak” (and we won’t know it was the peak for certain until afterwards anyway) but it is clearly some time around now1We know this because the rate of growth in infections has now descended to around or below 1. I could write a whole article on this, but this tweet captures it..
At this point it is vital that we know what kind of endgame we wish to target with COVID-19. We will make dramatically different choices depending on this choice. And I suspect the best endgame may not be the one we are drifting towards.
| ↑1 | We know this because the rate of growth in infections has now descended to around or below 1. I could write a whole article on this, but this tweet captures it. |
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