The SNES and the Gamecube did have the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively though, but I'd probably count that as sideward compatibility rather than backward compatibility.
> All of those single celled organisms didn't come from nowhere, overnight. There was, at least at some point, the first single celled organism. Not only the first one, but the first one that was able to reproduce. There could have been millions, billions of single celled organisms incapable of reproduction that died. The odds of just getting one single celled organism, by itself, without the ability to reproduce, is already ludicrous.
The general thinking among researchers is that single-celled organisms were preceded by self-replicating and self-catalyzing molecules, like RNA. Abiogenesis is a fascinating area of research.
> Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence. Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.
That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection makes them very different scenarios.
> Exactly. And this market has a really unfulfilled niche: cameras with a decent optical system and changeable lenses. I have a Sony Alpha camera and it's plenty enough for me in image quality, but I now leave it home most of the time because I just don't want to fiddle with it.
When I leave my MILC at home, it's because the optics are large and heavy, not because the body is. When I do take my camera, I usually opt for the Sony Zeiss 35 mm Sonnar T*, because it's so small. From an optical point of view, it's a good lens, but it's not the best 35 mm lens I have.
For capturing memories, the best camera really is the one you have with you at all times. For creating photographs, the bulk of the camera body really doesn't matter that much.
The more I think about the more I feel that this is the wrong solution to the problem. Disclaimer: I'm doing a small open source espresso controller project, check it out if you're interested, but it's not ready for prime time yet: https://github.com/variegated-coffee.
My thinking is that this machine appeals mostly to people who already has an espresso machine. It's not particularly technologically advanced. It's a single boiler, an E61 group and a vibratory pump. If you're buying this machine, you're probably replacing a machine at a similar technology level, and that's not really a sustainable choice.
A well maintained espresso machine has a lifespan in the range of decades. Many recent innovations in espresso machines is mostly controllers, sensors and actuators. Also better pumps. These are all things that can easily be retrofitted to an older espresso machine.
There has been innovation in other areas not easily retrofittable (saturated groups, dual boilers instead of heat-exchangers, to name a few), but this machine doesn't really feature any of those.
I strongly believe that in this particular demographic, it's a much better (more sustainable, cheaper and all around more fun) idea to retrofit new and advanced parts to the espresso machine they presumably already have, than to buy a whole new machine. We don't need old espresso machines on landfills.
On the off chance that a prospective buyer doesn't already have a similar espresso machine, this isn't too bad of a choice, and the price is decent, but on the other hand, there are a lot of used machines on the market that are looking for a new owner and can be upgraded.
It's also at least as expensive as more advanced machines you can buy already-assembled.
If this was half the price, I might be interested. But if I wanted a coffee maker with open source control, I'd probably just hack an existing cheaper product. And I'm someone who absolutely loves assembling stuff from kits!
Heck, I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already got Doom running on a Sage.
It's also at least as expensive as more advanced machines you can buy already-assembled.
Exactly. The parent post mentions this being "the wrong solution to the problem", but I don't know what the problem is this product is addressing. E61 machines are well understood and diagrammed with (somewhat) interchangeable parts. If this product appeals to you, you can buy a cheaper/similarly priced machine, take it apart and put it back together yourself.
Oh, don't get me started on what the problem is :D
* Espresso machine electronics are very proprietary. There's basically one manufacturer, no published schematics and very closed firmwares.
* That one manufacturer's hardware occasionally breaks and needs replacement, and they charge up the wazoo for it.
* Firmware updates is not a thing. Buying a new controller with the new firmware is your only option.
* Espresso machine electronics hardware is pretty firmly stuck in the past. If you're lucky you have a 128x64 px OLED, but more likely you have LED indicators, 7 segment displays, or graphical LCDs.
There are absolutely exceptions to this, but for 95% of the espresso machines out there, you're definitely not getting the full potential of the hardware.
> * Espresso machine electronics hardware is pretty firmly stuck in the past. If you're lucky you have a 128x64 px OLED, but more likely you have LED indicators, 7 segment displays, or graphical LCDs.
I don't know if I'd consider adding a screen to an espresso machine to be an improvement. What would it be useful for?
I have a no-display machine and I wish it had a few things that a screen would facilitate:
(1) Automatic shot timer.
(2) Shot volume display (my machine is a volumetric one, but I have to measure the weight of the output to calculate what volume it dispensed)
(3) Ability to configure other parameters, such as pre-infusion time, where I'm guessing the manufacturer just left this out because it would complicate an already kind of painful button + LED UI.
I also wish it had a group head temperature sensor, but that would add more hardware to the machine than just the screen.
I don't think any of these issues are solved by selling you a pile of parts and having you build the machine yourself. An open/more flexible PID is a great idea, but that's just one piece of this product & could be built into an already assembled machine. There are some machines (Decent, Sam Remo You) that give you a lot more control, but even this level of control probably goes unused by a lot of its users if the h-b forums are to be believed.
More control than that, or a totally open PID, might be a hard sell for safety reasons. That alone is a nonstarter, but even as you approach that level of openness, it would be pretty hard to support and really isn't needed if you just want a good shot of espresso and aren't taking an niche academic approach to an already niche process. This is why you likely won't see it in more commercial machines.
Perhaps you're thinking of the commercial market and I'm thinking of consumer, but there's been a lot of really interesting developments in the last few years at the intersection of affordable and high quality output -- I own a plus Bambino plus now, for example, which is simply a delightful machine, though I too wish I could modify the firmware.
Gicar. If you're looking at home machines from manufacturers that also do commercial (e.g. Profitec, ECM, Lelit, Rancilio, La Marzocco etc), they almost exclusively use Gicar electronics.
Now the big question - was Baratza cool to deal with? I haven’t had too much interaction with them, but I replaced (they sold me) a controller board for my Vario-W for a reasonable price, as well as burrs and the drive. The machines are good for what they are, but their service (what they pride themselves on) is exceptional in my experience.
An E61 is the wrong choice. They have fluidic mechanical pressure ramp system. A modern machine ought to have adjustable computerized pressure profiles.
Yes. E61s are full of springs and an orifice and a valve body that ramps the pressure mechanically. This is not only overly complicated but it exposes the brew water to dissimilar metals and adds a ton of surface area to shit up with rancid coffee oil. A group with a shorter water path is better since we can easily have control over the pressure with a computer.
I’m actually taking a very componentized approach with my new Rust based firmware. Wherever it makes sense, I’m spinning things off into separate crates and will be publishing them (e.g. crates for the ADS124S08 and FDC1004 used in the All-Purpose Espresso Controller.
Also, everything is permissively licensed, so feel free to use whatever you want.
I only see power requirements (1300 W) but no mention of voltage or frequency requirements---not even in the user guide. The pricing in € hints that the creators are in 240/1/50-land, and that I'm out-of-luck in the 120/1/60 wastes of North America. It's a shame, because I'm very much the target demographic for a kit like this. One could transform it from 120 V or run it on our 240 V split-phase with an isolation transformer of course, but running the A/C pump 20% faster might be dubious.
As an aside, I'm frustrated for the same reason regarding induction cooktops. European units are a fraction of the cost of their American equivalents.
You're probably not out-of-luck. Just buy a heat element designed for your grid's voltage. The electronics' internal PSU might already be capable having a wide range input.
Besides that, I would absolutely not recommend you buy this.
Reason: the parent commenter already hinted in the right direction. The E61 brew group is ancient (invented in 1961 by Faema in Italy, hence the name), it sports 4kg of brass and many moving parts (3 valves, camshaft + lever) and features an analog pre brew chamber.
I do restore italian espresso machines for a hobby and have come to the same conclusion as the parent. Even if they're not maintained properly those things are meant to last and can in most cases be resurrected. Most spare parts are readily available and defacto industry standard (eg. The Brasilia ring brew head) and you can retrofit nice electronics easily (eg. clever coffee or the gaggiuino foss controller project featuring pressure transducers, pid controller(s) and a controllable Flow/Pressure rate, profiles, apps and so on).
This diy project is imho bland and uses the most ancient brew head available, with unnecessary heat dissipation, long warmup times and probably leaded brass...
I rent a place with an espresso machine, but the next place I'm moving to doesn't have one. I absolutely love tinkering and open source. I like coffee, but I'm not crazy about perfection. I value the experience of building it and owning a self-built thing highly.
This is perfect for me. There must be dozens of people like me. Dozens!
Although I've been regularly fixing my Baratza grinder and Rancilio Silvia for years the fact is that disassembling hardware and tightening screws still looks slightly scary and dangerous. It is always an adventure but not always fun.
My fearless limit on hardware DIY is assembling IKEA furniture and cleaning my bike. Beyond that, I'd think twice.
Personally I really like my Luddite espresso setup--OE hand grinder and La Pavoni lever machine. The tech, pumps, etc really don't do it for me.
The only thing I'd change is the electric heating element. I'd like to be able to use it on my boat where electric BTUs are expensive compared to gas. Maybe there's a DIY boiler in my future.
Sage/Breville Dual Boiler and do the slayer mod + drip tray mod, you can then pull espresso that rivals any machine out there for a fraction of the cost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmQgxQ5Higw
The machine is old enough to be well understood with documented mods and fixes, it's dual boiler, triple PID, extreme temp stability, fill from the front, drip tray indicator. I love it.
Get a used Rancilio Silvia + do a fully fledged Gaggiuino build.
Check this Video comparison (Not a modded Silvia though, but a Gaggia classic which I would not recommended due to its aluminum boiler and the new China manufactured models have a (probably Teflon) coated boiler that likes to shed the coating... just search on reddit). The emphasis in this comparison is on the Gaggiuino mod, which does all the magic (profile based brewing). The underlying base machine is not that important. I would stay away from Sage/Breville, too much non standard parts and lots of plastic for my taste.
My go-to recommendation for single boiler vibratory pump machines has been Gaggiuino. I’m not sure I can still recommend it after their latest source-closing move, but it is absolutely still the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade for single boiler vibratory pump machines.
Personally, I've begun switching over my RP2040 projects to Rust using Embassy. Rust did take some getting used to, but I quite like it. Not an RTOS, but it satisfies a lot of the same requirements that'd lead you to an RTOS.
If you go this route, I would recommend starting off with the rp2040-hal crate and once you hit a pain point of managing multiple tasks, look into embassy or RTIC.
Rust and Cargo take the pain out of building and flashing to the RP2040 (or STM32, for that matter) - it's the most pleasant embedded setup I've ever used.
That is what I've observed too. My impression is that people go to RTOS for libraries and dependency management, which you kinda just get out of the box with Rust, cargo and crates.io.
A lot of applications simply don't use the MPU. And then consider what you get from Rust memory safety and the reduction in overall complexity of the firmware without the RTOS.
I can totally second this. Embedded rust in general has been an excellent experience for me. And async with embassy-executor works really well and takes a lot of pain off the whole rtos design process.
100%, Embassy is great and I'm in love with it. If you add the PIO interface for RP2040 the setup makes code super simple and beatiful and difficult to achieve with another processor.
RTIC is really simple and doesn't use it's own HALs. Also it's macro system makes it hard to modularize your code since all tasks need to be in one module. I've played around with it a bit and it seems like it could be great in the future, but currently not really.
Embassy has it's own HALs which makes it better at async and has also nicer ergonomic IMO
> Embassy has it's own HALs which makes it better at async and has also nicer ergonomic IMO
Worth noting, you don't HAVE to use the embassy HALs with the embassy executor. However, AFAIK, the only mainstream non-embassy HALs that supports async is the ESP32 HALs.
There's no technical lock in, it's just that everyone I've seen implementing async support (outside ESP32) tends to do it within the Embassy project today. That may change over time.
One of the things not immediately apparent for people coming to Embassy is that you can mix and match RTIC with the Embassy HALs. So the more appropriate comparison is RTIC vs the Embassy async executors.
A debug probe is nice (quite possibly a must) if you're actively developing, but for deploying in a hobbyist environment, USB is hard to beat.
I make open source espresso machine hardware (github.com/variegated-coffee), and it's nice to be able to give users a wired way to update firmwares that doesn't require extra hardware.
> If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?
This is rarely the choice though. In my experience, the choices tend to be the $800 low quality sofa, the $3000 low quality but with a name brand sofa, and the $6000 low quality but with an even fancier name brand sofa.
Presumably there are some manufacturers that still produce furniture that's actually made of massive wood rather than cardboard and veneer, but it's becoming increasingly rare.
I don't disagree with you - but this also explains the determining factor in which product wins and why today's markets or sofas are lower quality than they were 30+ years ago. If price doesn't matter - what's going to be the driving force in buying behavior? Consumer behavior in other words is no longer driven by quality or long-term cost: today, people will simply choose the lowest cost items and deal with the pain of having to replace it every X years. This drives the market to place a premium on what then? LOWEST COST. Lowest cost = the manufacturers that cut corners and reduce quality, so the market driving force (consumers) lead to a game where the lowest cost producers win and thus saturate the marketplace with junk.
I bought a sofa from a local builder a few years ago for around $2500. The frame is well built but the cushions lost their original shape within 6 months. All told, I'd rather have the sturdy sofa that looks a bit sloppy over a sofa that will break if more than three friends sit on it but I'd really rather have a sturdy one that still looks great after five years.
There are loads of manufacturers that still do this. Go to any furniture row, you’ll see the Ikea parking lot is full, the rc willey parking lot less so, and the premier quality furniture brands parking lots nearly empty.
Well, there's no cheap competitors with (automatic) flow profiles, but there are competitors with automatic flow profiles. ACS Vesuvius, Rocket R nine one (although IIRC this one is actually pressure profiling, not flow profiling), Synesso es.1, Sanremo You to mention some.
If you're looking at manual flow control, basically any E61 group machine can be outfitted with a needle valve for flow control, and a bunch of machines come with one installed from the factory, like the Lelit Bianca. There's also machines like the Slayer 1 group and La Marzocco GS/3 MP.
Gagguino is very cool, and if you're just pulling espressos and not too many back to back, it should be plenty of machine. If you're doing more than a couple of milk drinks, or pull lots of shots back to back, or want to connect it to plumbing, it's not as great of a machine. The fact that you started out with a small single boiler with a vibration pump starts to show.
This is a bit inaccurate, and that is reflected in the top results when you google it.
Conical burrs are not cheaper. You call this when you look at them, the shape is pretty complex. They often don’t have good (low) retention as they are often on massive commercial equipment. They are consistent as all hell.
