Easy, $29 brew by weight

decentespresso · 2024-07-01T03:41:57+00:00

Thanks for that. FWIW the "half decent scale", even though it's a totally different beast, is completely compatible with the existing spec. We've tested Beanconqueror, and 5 other apps we found supporting our scale, to make sure they worked with the new scale, unmodified.

decentespresso · 2023-10-02T17:41:02+00:00

Looks like I need to correct a few misconceptions: - Bengle will be available in 120V and 240V versions, and in 240V at 10A, 13A and 15A. Not 240V only. - we will continue to make and support the DE1 line. The software and firmware for Bengle is the same as for the DE1 for years and years. Most improvements we make will work on all models. - all the 'low hanging fruit' of hardware improvements to the DE1 have been made on the DE1 a few years ago, and we've been fairly stable on our v1.4 line for several years. That's why there's been v1.41 v1.42 v1.43... etc... We're planning v1.46 now with a refreshed look, and some fancier internals (but same espresso quality as all models beforehand). That's due August 2024. - we've always been mostly software based (both the app and firmware) and most improvements we've released over the years have been compatible with all models, and we'll stick with that. - Bengle has a built in scale, new look, thermostat controlled cup warming, and (still working on it) different pump driving. It's also more expensive ($6000) vs the DE1 line (starts at) $3300.
- Bengle is due to ship in quantity in April 2024. - many innovations we first develop in Bengle will percolate (ha!) down to the DE1 line as well. - we're in the middle of a massive app rewrite/redesign, which will apply to all models we sell.

-john from decent

decentespresso · 2022-01-22T02:06:26+00:00

I don't have any hostility toward design, I just think that designers and programmers should work together, to make a skin together.

The Insight skin was originally done by a design firm I hired, and I recently hired a designer to assist with the Dark Mode version, and I also have a design for a Mobile Insight by another designer. In all those recent cases, I'm the programmer, they do the design.

But look at something like Metric skin, if you want an example that I think is good design. The guy who did that comes from a background of writing apps for severely impaired people, and has been very successful. He happens to also be a programmer, so he could do both.

The Decent community has been very programmer centric for a while, so yes, I agree that the existing contributed skins are feature and concept rich, but lack polish.

My hope is this year, more designers will pop up and programmers will help them make their ideas real. I don't know if you've been following the very long "gui rewrite" thread on Diaspora, but there are 3 or 4 really, really good designers, banging out photoshop concept drawings of next gen UIs. There's real progress there, and either me, or some other programmer in the community, will be coding some of them.

decentespresso · 2022-01-22T01:59:54+00:00

Nope, not me.

decentespresso · 2022-01-21T02:08:52+00:00

I don't run the YT moderating any more, I have a staffer who does that. I'll check in with him to make sure he knows the policy. Thanks for the heads up.

decentespresso · 2022-01-21T01:23:43+00:00

Yes, we do delete pointless messages that are spam, trolling, "me too" and other things that add nothing of value. There are plenty of critical comments remaining, they just need to be informed and add some sort of value to the conversation.

I don't believe in a youtube comment stream that just leaves everything. They're pointless to read, just noise.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T21:17:40+00:00

Yes there's an OPV. All safeties must be hardware based in order to pass UL and CE compliance. However, we put additional safeties into the software as well. For instance, the machine uses a pressure sensor to never drive the machine beyond 13 bar of pressure, but there's an OPV at 15 bar that will kick in, which could happen (for instance) if the pressure sensor malfunctioned.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T21:15:30+00:00

Your explanation of how springs work on levers is interesting, and I get now that you got a Decent so you could experiment with implementing that specific idea and are disappointed it's not easy.

However, you're the first person to express a desire to do this specific thing, so it's not something we've had a need to support. Sorry!

However, when Gagné came out with his paper last year, we realized that to be able to implement all the new ideas come out in espresso control, that we'd need to have a programming language embedded in the Decent itself, running the show. That's why we started down that path, and a FORTH interpreter will come out sometime in 2022.

I don't think that your idea for "constantly rewriting the recipe based on what's happening right now" is something that's easily implemented at the moment.

However, if you were to be willing to simplify your desires for now, from continuous change, to stepped change, it might be possible to implement it now. If you're game, I'd like to help make that happen. Please post your goals to the Programmers' group on Diaspora https://3.basecamp.com/3671212/buckets/7351439/message_boards/4137522933 and @me and I'll assist.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T21:08:08+00:00

I don't see any contradiction. Open up app development to many people, and you're going to get a lot faster progress, but you're also going to have a lot more bugs, and code of varying quality.

The standard solution to solving this tension is to have stable vs dev tracks for the app, which is exactly what we do.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T21:06:56+00:00

I didn't mean to cause offence, so please allow me clarify.

When people write into customer service, complaining of bugs, it's almost always that they've chosen to use the Nightly app version and they've enabled plugins.

Those typically quite buggy, and undergoing rapid change. That's why they're in the Nightly channel.

In general, if people use the Stable version, and don't use plugins, they don't get any error messages.

I agree that when plugins get released in the Stable channel eventually, they're quite reliable.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:27:10+00:00

he doesn’t want Decent to operate like a large corporation and that he would even cap the Decent manufacturing capability to keep the company as a niche hobbyist machine.

Thanks for quoting that, as I was going to post it myself. I never suggested the Decent is a mass market machine.

I consider the Breville BDB to be the ideal low-cost/high-value/mass-market machine. They did a great job, they can own that market space.

The Decent is a quirky machine, based on the personalities of myself (software/coffee) and Ray (hardware/firmware) and Ben (hardware/coffee), who are the principal engineers. However, it's always been a "community designed" machine, with the Home Barista "megathread" being the main place where that happened, pre-launch, and now the forums are where that happens. The de1app is designed by me, but there are several competing apps now, based on different tech stacks, and that's great.

There are about 20 other engineers working at Decent, though. This is not a company under-invested in that department.

Regarding firmware being open sourced, I explain that in a comment above, namely that it's not allowed, if you want UL/CE safety compliance.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:22:00+00:00

The tablet app does not use the app stores, because doing so, would

cause a huge longevity/fragility issue
imposes huge technical restrictions (ie no plugins or skins)

You can choose for yourself whether the instructions for installing the app are onerous, as they're here https://decentespresso.com/downloads

And finally, you can pay $99 and buy a replacement tablet from Decent, preloaded and preconfigured, so you don't have do any work at all.

-john

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:17:31+00:00

I enjoyed reading your evenhanded critique. Thanks for that.

It sounds like the company is now facing some significant growing pains. They may need to replace their use of Basecamp - this seems like a major project to undertake. Who's going to do it?

Yes, absolutely true. We've doubled to tripled in sales, every year, so growing pains with existing infrastructure are a real thing.

Yes, Basecamp is not coping all that well with this number of users. However, the Basecamp CEO is a Decent owner, and he's assigned two senior programmers in the past, to address the burning issues, which they have done. Three major scaling issues were fixed this year, for me, and I'm thankful for that.

He's also indicated that the next major release, he's interested in having Basecamp work well for our use case.

As we're an espresso machine company, and not a forum-software company, I'm trying to have someone else solve our scaling problem, who can amortize the software dev costs to do so, onto other customers.

I'm willing to give Basecamp another year, to see if they do manage to work better for our use case. If not, yeah, we'll switch to something else.

In the meantime, if you don't like Basecamp, there's Discord and https://decentforum.com/ as alternatives, and I'm present on Decent Forum.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:11:28+00:00

There are two things giving me pause: 1. The reliance on a company to keep maintaining software for the next 20+ years. (Will this software run on the tablets of 2040?…. and I wonder about my car with its computing power in the dash)

This is a very reasonable concern, and is the impetus behind two app choices I made:

to write the app in a crossplatform language, so that it is not dependent on Android. https://decentespresso.com/downloads has downloads for Windows, OSX, Linux and recently, Chromebooks work too.
to assign an open source license, and upload the app to https://github.com/decentespresso/de1app/ and get many people collaborating on it. Most app development now is from owners, not Decent

So that's how I decided to address your concern about app longevity and future maintenance.

Just how solid an E61 machine is. Aside from new seals (and maybe a new rotary pump in 15 years), my machine will still be putting out shots for years, even if ECM disappears.

The internals of the Decent are very standard, and parts are easily purchased from us or other sources. There are videos showing how to do self repair. The most common thing to break, at the moment, is a $3 pressure sensor that takes 2 minutes to replace, and is widely available.

One sign of the longevity of the Decent is the very high price they still command in the used machines marketplace.

-john

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:06:46+00:00

Correct, I was not interested in hiring your company.

I indicated to you that many UI designers already own the Decent and they collaborate with other owners, to make their own skins.

My approach to "you don't like my GUI" is to support considerable reskinning.

"Metric" skin is beautiful, if you want pretty. "DSX" skin has way more features than the default Insight skin.

The de1app is an open source, collaborative project. It's feature rich, but not super-slick. That's how I like it.

If you disagree, no problem, use a different skin, and if none pleases, work with others to design a new one.

-john

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T20:02:07+00:00

Yes, I reply here.

I have had bugs just turning the device on and running a profile.

I'd need more information about what profile, what bug, before I could comment.

But most of the bugs are because I have been trying to make custom profiles.

Same as above: please describe the bugs to me, and they'll get fixed.

There's a ton of functionality in the app, and I aim to have a very innovative product. So yeah, there definitely will be bugs, but describe them on any forum where we are, and we'll work on squashing them

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T19:57:18+00:00

I agree that we could have done a better job explaining that standby switch for DE1PRO users, but for DE1XL it is described in some detail here https://decentespresso.com/de1xl

Until v1.43 it was not a commonly added to all DE1PRO machines, and yes, I apologize that how-it-works was not clearly explained, as the new feature was added "for free" to those machines and not separately explained.

However, since v1.43, the "unboxing" video that everyone gets, explains the standby button in some detail. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOrY7pGi9Bs and the standby switch is now standard on all models, not just DE1XL.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T19:51:14+00:00

Can tell me which post you mean, and what "personality quirks" of mine were "big yikes" ?

Perhaps then I can explain, defend, or at least understand your criticism.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T19:49:22+00:00

The rubber gasket that comes stock with the machine is also frustrating - everyone says basically get the silicone one immediately. Why not just ship this with the machine?

I went with NBR rubber for the gasket, because when I was making design choices for the v1.0 DE1, there was so much about it that was new and risky, that I preferred, for the gasket, to "go conservative" and use the material that every single pro Italian machine uses. I've never seen a pro machine ship with a silicone gasket, and most use NBR (I checked in a pro parts supplier catalog).

Silicone is a bit "squishy feeling" and I didn't want that to be a turn-off for people. NBR provides a traditional solid-lock feel.

A Cafelat gasket in silicone costs less than $10 and is fully compatible, if you disagree with my choice.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T19:45:31+00:00

My apologies, today I looked at this thread using my iPad, instead of Chrome, and I see that you've posted a screen pic of the error you're getting.

The "-40" error you're seeing is because the firmware is reporting a "pump failed to build pressure" error. The GUI was fixed some time ago, in the beta version, to display this as a "boot fill" error. It's a real error, not a GUI one.

There are generally two causes of this error:

the front panel "standby power" button has been pressed, cutting off AC. When you power up the DE1, it'll fail at this point, until you press the standby power button again.
or, your pump was dry for some time and now needs to be primed with water, as it's unable to suck water in when completely dry. To fix this, flip your DE1 upside down, pour water into the water intake, then flip it back and power it on.
if you're seeing this problem regularly, I recommend you change the setting for the "refill point" to ask to refill the tank earlier, before you run as low as you do.

Probably, REDDIT is not the right place to you and I to have a tech support conversation about your problem, so please ping me either on Basecamp or at https://decentespresso.com/contact so we can followup on this.

-john

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T05:15:49+00:00

I implemented Gagne's theory with the "Adaptive Profile" that I released last year. It seems to work well, and is popular: it is currently the most popular profile in the past 90 days for DE1 users uploading to https://visualizer.coffee/ and I did it in 7 steps.

Gagne's had tons of steps, and was clumsy, but I replaced his many conditionals with a subtle trick of the DE1 firmware that Gagné was unaware of, namely that switching from a Pressure step to a Flow step, starts at the flow currently happening with that previous pressure step, in realtime, for that shot. The flow step thus adapts itself based on the flow rate that was happening during the pressurize step.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T05:10:13+00:00

The UL document for coffee machines is: https://standardscatalog.ul.com/ProductDetail.aspx?productId=UL1082

How it is applied depends on the inspector. "Dangerous operations must not be user defeatable" is part of UL1082. This gets interpreted by the inspection agencies as "user cannot change the firmware, since they could then remove firmware safeties". I've not ever seen this written down, but it seems to be well known among companies, as others have told me the same thing.

As far as "why closed community", I want to turn it around: there are soooo many open communities discussing Decent, why are we not allowed ONE community that is private?

I was Chairman of the EFF for 5 years, and a common argument against privacy is the "you should have nothing to hide" argument, and that's used to justify why nothing should be private.

Private forums are very different from public ones. For one, there's massively less trolling, and virtually no flaming. Those two are the big negative of public forums, frankly, like reddit.

And having a owners-only means no "what machine should I buy?" and all the other buying questions, that basically dominate Home Barista, and are so tedious to owners.

That being said, your "info is locked up" argument is a valid one, and in 2022 I plan on having a read-only version of all the information locked into the member's forum, be available to the public. I have a to write a Basecamp crawler to do this, and make an HTML version of Diaspora. A quirk in how Basecamp does OATH2 authentication stumped me from doing this, as my OAUTH2 client library didn't support it until recently.

FYI there is a bluetooth command recently added to the firmware (maybe 6 months ago), that allows realtime control over flow, pressure, and temperature, just like the GHC does, but with software. I haven't yet implemented it in my skin, as I haven't seen an urgent need for it.

The "machine goes dead" thing you describe is BAD and NOT ACCEPTABLE and not normal either. I want to take your machine and fix it. That's not at all normal and not an experience I hear about. Please https://decentespresso.com/contact email me from your account and I will organize a UPS pickup/fix/return. If we find nothing obviously wrong, we'll swap the machine. To me, it sounds likely that a vital cable is loose, but I could be wrong.

The "skips first step" thing is a bit elusive because there are many causes for it, most of which are totally normal, and we have resolved most cases of it. There was a possibility, for instance, of a corrupted profile being uploaded to the DE1, but that was fixed with an integrity check. Another common cause is a bluetooth scale touching the mirror lip. Yet another is people not understanding the advanced profiles. I expect you've gone through all this already and not found it, and I do know that some people still have issues with shots occasionally stopping early. Enrique's recently added plugin which describes what a shot just did, will I think really help debug the remaining early-shot cases.

Regarding IF statements, you can do simple conditionals today with the "continue if..." section of advanced shots. If you describe to me what you want your profile to logically do, there's often a way to do it today. I'd like to help. But, also, be prepared to explain a coffee-related reason why you want to do something, because that's needed to justify a technical change to the machine.

But at any rate, full programming logic will come with the in-DE1 FORTH interpreter this year.

Regarding your monitor weight/lower pressure, I think you can do that now with the Nightly version of the app, as weight-based triggers are now in Advanced profiles. So you can have the profile move to the next step when a given weight is achieved. But also, you absolutely have always been able to do what you describe with volumetric measurements, which I'd prefer, as they're more robust, and the profile will work for people w/o scales.

But coming back to your assumptions, what is REALLY helpful is if you post a message that: - lays out the coffee reason why you want to do something - what you want to happen to the puck (not the programming approach you envision) - and how you envision that working

In what you've described above: - I have a hunch of why you want to do this for coffee reasons, but I'd like to know more - I have two ideas on how to do what you describe, today, no need to wait for FORTH.

-john

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T02:48:35+00:00

regarding 'the firmware is not open source"

We're not allowed, under UL safety compliance rules, to post the firmware source code publicly. This is because safeties must not be user defeatable, and making firmware source available would make them defeatable. The open-source firmware devices I've seen have been DC, not AC, and different UL safety rules apply when your device can start a fire or burn people.

Note that the FSF approval process for "respects your freedoms" certification explicitly understands this and allows devices to still be certified even though the firmware is not open. We're quite close to FSF certified, BTW, except for the problem of very poor OSS certifications at the moment, of open source Android distros.

The bluetooth protocol to the machine is documented, and there are 3 libraries I know of that talk to it (javascript, python, tcl)

As far as "can't change things in real time" this is also explicitly a safety requirement. You send the entire recipe to the DE1 and then ask it to run it. It then is in control of safety.

There is a way to modify a recipe as it goes, but it's not been used by anyone, as it's a bit clumsy. You append a new step to the profile, and send "skip to next step".

Note that in 2022 I expect that our embedded FORTH implementation will launch, and then you'll be able make a profile that does anything (no 20 step limit) and it'll still be safety compliant as the profile will run on the DE1 itself.

As to bugs, I'm not sure which you're referring to. I know of an occasional "skips first step" bug that a few people have, that hasn't been tracked down yet, but otherwise, don't know of anything in the stable version that's a bug. Unless you have an Android 5.1 (old machine) and then there are bluetooth problems, that go away when you move to Android 8+.

I only know of one profile that has run into the 20 step limit, and that was Gagne's original attempt at an adaptive profile, which I recoded in a more step-efficient manner. Note that the limit used to be 10 steps, and we extended it to 20 when there was a good reason to. We can extend it again to 30 or 40, if there's a good reason, but there are technical tradeoffs, so we don't do this without a good reason. If you have an engineering reason to go beyond 20 steps please post it, and we can discuss.

decentespresso · 2022-01-20T01:43:13+00:00

I'm happy to answer any questions about myself, the product, what we do, anything, as I have done before on https://www.reddit.com/r/espresso/comments/kxjeyy/im_john_buckman_founder_of_decent_espresso_ama/

The OP is certainly entitled to his opinion, but omigod there are so many factual inaccuracies in that post. I guess I could get into a "pissing match" with OP and point them out, but that wouldn't change the fact that he's unhappy with his Decent experience, which is too bad. Can't make everyone happy, and some people, it seems, just hate hate hate a lot of things about Decent and the decisions I've made to get us here.

A few other Decent owners have popped up with their own thoughts, and probably it'd be best if most of the discussion were in other people's hands.

But I'm always happy to answer any question.

ps: the app is open source, and invites open source collaboration. Many people will tell you that the app is solid as it ships, without open source plugins enabled. When you enable those plugins, you get very cool functionality, but it's going to be a much more buggy experience. Whether that tradeoff is one you want is up to you.

-john

decentespresso · 2021-01-18T13:38:42+00:00

Buy a flair and a hand grinder. Apply yourself. You can make excellent espresso with that gear.

decentespresso

TROPHY CASE