So I really like having my own espresso machine. I love the fact that my espresso is better than the espresso I can get at a very large percentage of coffee shops around the city. But I still keep going to places with coffee that isn’t as good as I could make myself. Maybe just because I like to get out of the house more often or something.
But then again you really can’t ignore the communal element of a coffee shop. i think that’s why I want to have lots of espresso parties in my apartment now. I want to have guests over at any hour of the day just for a good cup of coffee. Why, because I love sharing food with people. … I love sharing with people. I love having people over to share with.
Also I’ve just gotten my PID working on my machine. I can now recover from one shot to the next in about the amount of time it takes to get the next shot ready. It’s totally amazing. And at least for the Brazilian roast I was using, I was able to get consistent mottling on my shots. It’s great how much the Silvia is really capable of.
A friend of mine referred me to your blog. I believe he is married to your cousin Kara. Great work on the blog. We are actually in the process of starting a coffee house in Colorado.
My question actually pertains to your comments about the Rancilio Silvia. I personally own this machine and love it. I was curious about your PID project. Where did you get the kit and how much did it cost? I am interested in doing this to my machine now that it is out of warranty, but I don’t want to spend the $300 that most places charge and would be interested in building one if there were kits or instructions available.
I got most of the design from some schematics and code for an arduino based system. http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/CoffeeTronics But I had to do a little work to get everything working right. You have to be careful with the thermocouple as a temp probe on the boiler, since the boiler is also the ground point in the system. I’m guessing not many of the people who have used the schematics posted online have as much noise coming through the ground line. The solution that worked best was throwing a capaciter across the leads on my circuit board. Most of the parts can be purchased from sparkfun. There are a other options besides the thermocouple which may work a little better. The code for handling button presses in quasi parallel to keeping the boiler temp on track is a little complicated too. All in all, I probably bought about 200 dollars worth of parts, but if you have any of it on hand, or want to keep the feature set fairly simple you may be able to do it for less.