So it has been quite a while since I wrote here last.\u00a0 I have not given up on this project but I’ve been up to other things since then.\u00a0 Around the time of my last post I moved to another city nearby and thus another house.\u00a0 In my free time I remodeled a bunch of things in the previous house installing new wood laminate floors through most of the house, replaced the ugly stick on tile flooring in the bathrooms with sheet vinyl, sprayed the bedrooms with new paint, redid the landscaping, installed new fencing, replaced a bunch of plumbing for the kitchen sink, installed a new dishwasher, new moulding, replaced a skylight, new lighting, and put in a new hood over the stove.<\/p>\n
It’s coming up on a year and a half now since that interruption and I think I’ve caught up on a lot of television and other things so I started getting back to coffee projects.<\/p>\n
The first think I’ve been playing around with is a control knob that I intend to eventually use to control an espresso machine with.\u00a0 I’ve got a basic prototype that lets me adjust a number for temperature with some buttons and lets me turn a knob to change a pressure.\u00a0 It displays the information about it on an OLED display and then sends it over Bluetooth to my smartphone for the moment.\u00a0 I’ll be coming up with a variation of this for the coffee roaster controller as well.<\/p>\n
The other thing I’ve been doing is looking for an espresso machine.\u00a0 Back a couple weeks ago I won an auction on eBay for a Salvatore Famosa espresso machine.\u00a0 I’m not sure how old it is but the previous owner thinks it’s about 10 years old.<\/p>\n
This machine has an E61 group head in it and is the automatic model where you power it on and it has buttons to start a single shot or a double shot vs the non-automatic where you flip a switch to run the pump to pull your shot and then you turn it off.\u00a0 It has a connector for direct plumbing as well as an internal tank.\u00a0 The boiler in it is a heat exchange boiler.\u00a0 It has a hot water and a steam wand on opposite sides of the machine.<\/p>\n
When I bought it the previous owner had said it was an As Is sale and the machine needed repairs or was sold as parts.\u00a0 Since I’m not intimidated by a lot of electronics and mechanical stuff it sounded like it wasn’t too bad.\u00a0 I picked it up over the weekend and have been working around inside it ever since.<\/p>\n
In my next post I’m going to discuss what I actually found inside the espresso machine and update on status of finishing working on it.<\/p>\n
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So it has been quite a while since I wrote here last.\u00a0 I have not given up on this project but I’ve been up to other things since then.\u00a0 Around the time of my last post I moved to another city nearby and thus another house.\u00a0 In my free time I remodeled a bunch of things in the previous house installing new wood laminate floors through most of the house, replaced the ugly stick on tile flooring in the bathrooms with sheet vinyl, sprayed the bedrooms with new paint, redid the landscaping, installed new fencing, replaced a bunch of plumbing \u2026 Continue reading