Hacking my filter coffee machine | Hacker News Reader

Hacking my filter coffee machine

diziet.dreamwidth.org

110 pointsedward87 comments

Meanwhile the Technivorm Moccamaster has a simple on/off switch that you could probably toggle with a relay, a motor, some gears, and a chopstick. It also makes just about the best coffee you're going to get with an automatic drip/filter machine.

The bigger challenge of course is that, if you want actually good coffee in the morning, you need to automate the weighing, grinding, and depositing of fresh coffee into a rinsed filter. That's going to look like Factorio in your kitchen.

I had a Oxo "Barrista Brain" that I really liked, partly because it would remind me when it needed cleaning, and could be scheduled to start brewing at a particular time. However, those fancy electronics ended up being the primary failure point 4 years down the line, the dial control failed.

I ended up replacing it with a Moccamaster and a Zigbee "smart outlet". Because the Moccamaster is so dead simple, I just leave it switched on, and use the button on the outlet to turn it off. To brew in the morning, I have a button on my headboard that if I hold it for 2 seconds starts the brewing. The "start brewing at X:YY" on the Oxo didn't end up working that great for me, because I get up at varying times (half an hour before my alarm this morning, for example).

So, I'd recommend anything with a rocker "on" switch and a smart plug, for sure.

I have a mocchamaster and when I switched to cold-brew, I couldn't go back.

After reading a friend's copy of "modernist cuisine" I was intrigued and tried the toddy system. A little clunky but the coffee was wonderfully mellow.

Since then I caved a little to practicality and use a cold brewer that is a 1/2 gallon mason jar with a perforated steel filter. The only difference I've ever heard about steel vs paper filters is that paper filters out the coffee oils (which could mean lower cholesterol).

+1 on a "cold brewer" that's just a jar and a filter. Cold brew is the easiest damn thing in the world and it's incredibly delicious. I actually sometimes brew cold brew and then heat it up, just because I like the smooth taste. You also don't have to give any kind of a shit about grind size or consistency since it's getting a 12-hour soak anyway. A lot of my cold brew is just espresso leftovers when I accidentally set the grinder wrong.

However I find that not all coffees taste good as cold brew. Some trial-and-error is needed.

I also find that paper filtering is much easier on my stomach than metal filtering, so I'd encourage it for anyone who has a sensitive stomach and doesn't already use a paper filter. Whatever oils are supposedly bad for my cholesterol, also make me feel like I'm simultaneously digesting myself and being rocketed to space, so IMO those are better off sent to the compost. I even use paper filters for Moka pot and espresso, in the form of circles cut from Chemex filters (courtesy of https://goodbrotherscoffee.com/).

> Meanwhile the Technivorm Moccamaster

+1 for that machine. It's not confused about what it is: it's a simple, well made machine. It'll probably outlast me.

> has a simple on/off switch that you could probably toggle with a relay, a motor, some gears, and a chopstick. It also makes just about the best coffee you're going to get with an automatic drip/filter machine.

It's even simpler than that! I did a quick writeup [0] on how you can use a $10 'smart' outlet to drive the process. To save people a click: and the smart outlet has power monitoring functions and the coffee maker has it's own "no-water-left" protection it's pretty easy to detect if the thing is brewing or not. If you want to take it further, you can also pulse power to get a preliminary bloom phase before you do the main brew.

> if you want actually good coffee in the morning, you need to automate the weighing, grinding, and depositing of fresh coffee into a rinsed filter.

I will not contest that the best coffee is the coffee that's been ground and brewed right in front of me. I will posit that if you do the grind before bed and then brew in the AM, the quality isn't going to be that different and pre-caffinated / still-groggy you is going to value the "it's there, ready to be drank" aspect far more than you'll value the marginal increase in quality that'd come from doing all the prep _right then_.

> That's going to look like Factorio in your kitchen.

That's not a downside, if you ask me :D. If you ask others, though...

0: https://karlquinsland.com/improved-esphome-coffee-automation...

>I will not contest that the best coffee is the coffee that's been ground and brewed right in front of me. I will posit that if you do the grind before bed and then brew in the AM, the quality isn't going to be that different and pre-caffinated / still-groggy you is going to value the "it's there, ready to be drank" aspect far more than you'll value the marginal increase in quality that'd come from doing all the prep _right then_.

I think I've become addicted to the tactility of making the coffee as much I have to the caffeine. Uh, I was going to go on a long description of the tactile experience of making the coffee in a pour-over brewer, but I'll save that for my journal ;)

> I think I've become addicted to the tactility of making the coffee as much I have to the caffeine.

You are not alone. Making pour-over coffee (from whole beans) is the first thing I do each morning, and I have several cups a day. Caffeine has no clearly noticeable effect on me, however, and I sometimes feel that I don’t even enjoy the taste that much. It dawned on me that the obsession is completely with the physical process, routine, and the fantastic aroma it creates.

You might notice it if you were to stop drinking coffee for a week - slight caffeine withdrawal. Also, I think that a small percentage of the obsession does come from caffeine addiction, the anticipation of the “hit”, etc. “No noticeable effect” can also mean that you just feel normal with it, but a bit uncomfortable (or tired) without.

I wouldn’t underestimate the drug, not anymore - doing a detox made me realize how it’s still a drug that does stuff to your brain and possibly your body.

Of course, YMMV.

You’re probably right, although I know people who get headaches if they go one morning without it and that’s certainly not the case with me (and I can sleep after a shot of espresso too).

I don’t underestimate it, but so far the evidence seems to point to moderate coffee consumption being a net benefit. I’ll probably try having a no-caffeine week at some point anyway, just for, you know, science.

Funny caffeine doesn't seem effect me like that.

But sugar does, I can only have a small piece of chocolate a day if I don't want headaches and muscle aches upon stopping.

With a couple of friends, we did a 0 caffeine challenge for a week. First to drink any caffeinated drink would have to get the first round of drinks after work on Friday.

Knowing the first couple of days I go without coffee I'm pretty slow, I started on the Saturday rather than the planned Monday.

On Tuesday I was getting tested for Covid because I was feeling feeverish (no actual fever), had cramps and intense pain in my back. By the end of the week I was feeling a little better. On Friday, we all had a cup of coffee together, no one had lost the challenge.

All that to say that never again will I underestimate the drug.

In that case automating any of it would be counter to the point, wouldn't it?

Yes, exactly! Automating it would take away the fun. I do understand why people automate it though - if you're trying to get your day started ASAP and coffee starts your day, then automating it makes a lot of sense.

> That's going to look like Factorio in your kitchen.

that would be great!

Ah, the Moccamaster. Probably the coffee machine that most closely obeys the UNIX philosophy.

> That's going to look like Factorio in your kitchen.

Why are you trying to make that sound like it is some kind of problem?

Yes, Moccamaster is the way to go.

I still do manual pour overs but it's hard to beat the Technivorm.

I imagine it's because the kettle is less precise when it comes to temperature (and decreases over the pour), whereas the machine can pump out the perfect temp the entire brew.

> The bigger challenge of course is that, if you want actually good coffee in the morning, you need to automate the weighing, grinding, and depositing of fresh coffee into a rinsed filter.

Cables & Coffee have done a video on an automated Moccamaster including fresh grinding. Admittedly, you'll still have to change the filter yourself - but grinding and even the water refill are automated :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Fz2ofHvX8

The Moccamaster is well built and looks classic, but it’s a _very_ barebones machine. No thermos flask, no programming, minimal controls.

> In my house the neutral is about 2-3V away from true earth.

You seem quite blasé about his. Where I live the city comes out monthly to check the ground point for our section of the street. I have seen them fiddle with it (salt it?) and at one point they moved it a few feet (notifying all the houses, digging up the steet slightly etc.

They really don't want any, well, potential problems.

MONTHLY? That seems, fascinating?

I have no reason to think this but that’d be great cover for a surveillance van checking tapes or something

A legitimate possibility around here but the Zuckerberg family lives a few blocks away s I doubt there'd be much available sigint from here.

I think it's more likely that Palo Alto Public Works is a little overstaffed, which TBH is fine by me.

Yesterday they came around checking every house’s water system for old lead pipes. They have already replaced everything to the meter and now they are checking the house side.

I’m glad they are doing it but they must have a lot of free time. This morning’s news said that most the US still has lead pipes in the water distribution network (not counting houses themselves).

Still surprises me that so many people are comfortable with private utilities.

+1 for the pun

Is this a common thing to do in some countries or is your city an outlier? I have never seen anything like it in my tiny part of the world.

I don’t know but Palo Alto takes a lot of its infrastructure seriously. Also the city operates its own utilities — 25 years ago it sold off the tv cable and service deteriorated so there is little interest in privatizing the rest.

I believe coffee enthusiasts here all know James Hoffman's YouTube channel already, but for the others, it's really worth your time and it might even get you seriously into coffee (especially if you have a hacker mindset), or at least, into James Hoffmann ;).

See for example these playlists:

- The AeroPress Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl2858ytsWi9...

- The Moka Pot Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl1Zot3qiJ-w...

- Understanding Espresso: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl3MuAzK5l3g...

- A Beginner's Guide to Coffee: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl0sUXHoxf7s...

- Weird Coffee Science: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl1Dmfogt84Q...

- Classics of Coffee: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxz0FjZMVOl1o_0fuLmLE...

I'll stop here but really the whole channel is awesome and interesting.

And of course once you start watching James Hoffman's videos and seriously get into coffee, you'll quickly realize that high-quality coffee making is [currently] simply not automatable.

Yes, but also you won't want to automate it because it will become a hobby and pleasure to make coffee as much as it will be to drink it :).

What's interesting is that the mechanics are totally automatable (a coffee machine is "just" a boiler, pump, and particle filter, after all - add a grinder if you want that too). And there are some very good machines out there that will do this.

The problem is that there are a lot of variables in a recipe that are tuned to the particular coffee so if you automate the entire brew, the person using the machine needs to tune all those variables. And the process being automated is so simple that you're not saving time or trouble.

The more interesting capsule coffee makers scan the capsule to tune the brew parameters for the particular coffee being brewed, but it's obviously a lot more expensive than a pour over and kettle.

As much as I admire DIY'ing issues to fix... this seems like a lot of effort and cost that could be easily fixed by buying a different coffee maker. The author even says the UI sucks, which is not the case for many other options on the market.

Buy one with a thermal carafe (so you don't have a hot plate at all, and also your coffee will taste much better than sitting on the hot plate all day...), and buy one that has a proper timer that has AM/PM.

The reason hot plates turn off is twofold: safety, and the longer its on a hot plate the worse the coffee tastes.

This is more of a hacking log and less of a discussion about good coffee machines.

The author was trying to see if they could.

Yep hotplates burn the coffee and I cringe when people say they need them on longer than 25m

By many measures, drip coffee comes out of the machine pre-ruined, so I don't see the real problem with ruining it further when you have to drown it in heavy cream and sugar to make it palatable in the first place.

But I'm probably a different person, I like the ritual of making my morning hot beverage of choice. It takes some time, sure, maybe even time that could be spent sleeping, but it also makes my day better to kick my sleep addled mind into gear doing a task it's done a thousand times instead of something actually challenging or important.

I love my fancy pour overs and specialty coffee espressos, and I still can appreciate a drip coffee made with clean water and fresh beans. I'm not sure why you'd say it's "pre-ruined".

Modern, good quality 'drip machines' are just automated pour over machines (Breville Precision Brewer, Technivorm Moccamaster, or any number other much cheaper options). Not sure why you'd call those 'pre-ruined' by any means. They can make pretty much just as good of coffee as a manual pour over such as a V60/Chemex/whatever.

I share your cringe. While I don't use a drip coffee maker anymore, some of the burned flavor can be mitigated by placing 3 coins/pennies on the hot plate to limit contact between it and the carafe. It's worth the $0.03 investment.

The MoccaMaster has a half-carafe setting that is basically just a lower hotplate temperature and it works well for me.

Conversely, use any $5 dripper with a physical on/off switch, then plug it into a smart plug. Keep the dripper always turned on, and use the plug to do all the smart stuff. I do this, and it’s so much easier to manage than whatever janky UI Breville came up with.

Do you have issues with GFCI outlets? I use a Z-wave smart plug for this exact use but find it often trips my GFCI circuit. Anything similar?

Let me tell you - it is devastating to wake up without the coffee you are expecting!

Mine’s plugged into a regular outlet. Maybe try a GFCI smart outlet?

Technology Connections has a great video on Drip Coffee makers[0].

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9H0MO-qS8

Always love to see TC mentioned. Very informative and entertaining videos on a variety of technology.

As soon as I read "I originally used the Arduino IDE, writing my program in C. I had a bad time with that and rewrote it in Rust," I was pretty sure that I'd be reading the root cause as being "Arduino C has 16-bit ints" (as I'd had the same experience in some delay-based relay control code I wrote a decade ago). Sure enough, that was the issue.

As a long-time C programmer and Rust newbie, it seems like a really long way 'round to switch languages just to avoid using longs, but for a hobby/learning project (or a C novice and experienced Rust dev), Rust makes more sense.

My reading of the root cause is that the Arduino IDE doesn’t provide the kind of debugging facilities that C programmers expect, like decent compiler warnings and support for static analysis and runtime sanitizers (at least for off-device test builds). It also does not work well with proper development tooling, in particular git.

The 16 bitness would have been OK if the dev environment had been tolerable. Tho, to be fair, although Ian is an experienced C programmer (he wrote dpkg) he has very little patience for C any more, so it would not have taken much adversity to make him switch to Rust. [I know Ian personally.]

The Arduino IDE definitely sucks for experienced programmers. I feel like they did a great job making the "zero to seven-eighths" experience pretty good for non-developers, but many of those same choices mean that the tooling drives SWEs batty.

platformio sorts most of reasonably well

I wonder how many here remember the OG coffee HOWTO

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Coffee.html

"If you only want a simple circuit, you can use Motorola's triac driver MOC301[012], together with a general purpose TRIAC like SC141D."

lol

(though I guess compared to MQTT + ATTiny85 + GPIO it is of its time)

I think it's not good for the coffee machine to keep the coffee warm. Coffee that has been kept warm for hours tastes awful. It's better to let it cool down, then warm it in a microwave when you want to drink it. If I've had enough coffee for the day and there is some left in the pot, I save it in the fridge for the next day, then re-heat it. Its flavor is not snob quality after that, but it's better than keeping it hot for that long.

Cheap coffee makers have a single heater that heats both the water and the hot plate. Since the water needs to be brought to a boil, the heater's thermostat needs to be above boiling, so the hot plate will also eventually hit boiling, which is really bad for the coffee.

Coffee machines usually don't boil the water. They heat it enough that there is some evaporation and the vapor pressure pushes the hot water through the drip mechanism. It is well below boiling, like maybe 170 or 180 F, and one of the complaints about cheap machines is that they don't get the water hot enough.

The issue of coffee tasting bad if kept hot too long is independent of the brewing method though. I generally make coffee manually (pour hot water over a drip cone) and it is an issue then too. I stopped using a thermal carafe because of it.

Seems like a lot of effort for bad coffee, why not just use an insulated carafe?

I had one of them drip coffee makers that ground the beans into a filter.

You could set it with an alarm.

Problem was the hot plate turned off after about 25 mins (and I wanted the jug warm a good bit longer).

I found if I switched the power off (at the wall) and back on again quickly, the hot plate would stay hot indefinitely.

I think this is a common way to bypass a certain type of timer, I can't even remember why I tried it out, but it works!

is it possible that this is a philips grind & brew machine? if so, you can increase the duration to a maximum of two hours.

Not so impressed. This is tempting:

https://jankube.de/espresso_konstruktion.php

https://jankube.de/espresso_programmierung.php

Making and tweaking good espresso at home with a regular high quality espresso machine is already tricky enough due to all the variables, let alone on a machine you build, program and tune yourself from scratch.

Nice hobby and flex for sure, but I'll have to pass this time.

I've been wanting to hack my espresso machine and get some feedback from the status LEDs, but I'm just using a SwitchBot to push the button [1] to turn it on. I use a smart wall plug that I use to turn it off. (It has a push button to toggle on/off, so turning it off at the wall means that the state never gets out of sync.) I also avoid the SwitchBot cloud app by communicating with the device directly via Bluetooth. YOu can also get cheaper alternatives on AliExpress.

[1] https://us.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-bot

Alternative solution: Fingerbot

Works great for anything with buttons.

https://www.adaprox.io/products/fingerbot-plus-1

i did this when i was young and still kinda new to programming and hardware. it was fun :)

https://alexyancey.com/coffeemaker

You not a coffee enthusiast if you haven't hacked your machine :-). I did the OPV mod to get that 9 bar pressure on my machine. Yes I have steered the conversation to espresso. The downside is it wastes water (pressure is reduced by diverting water to waste). But not having it jam the puck with too much pressure is worth it!

I like a high pressure extraction. If I tamp my espresso too hard, the machine has enough power to unscrew the portafilter and blast it off, punishing me for my sins.

Faema E-61 Legend. The best machine ever.

OPVs typically divert the water back into the water tank of the machine. That's at least how it worked in my machine. The only machine that immediately comes to mind that wastes water like that is the GS3 MP from LA Marzocco for $7,500. The GS3 uses a valve at the group head, after the boiler, rather than an OPV which is normally before the boiler.

I love this

> My original feeling was “I can’t be bothered dealing with the coffee machine innards” so I thought I would make a mechanical contraption to physically press the coffee machine’s “on” button.

Cba disassembling so maybe making a Rube Goldberg button pushing machine is first thought is exactly how my design process often goes!

I mean this is awesome but also why not use a smart plug with current monitoring and home assistant? Basically works out of the box...

Yeah ok, I'm married so I look for the wife approval factor in my hacks.

As cool as "useless" projects like this are, I think the few minutes it takes to use an aeropress are well worth it.

Mind you, in Aus drip filter machines basically don't exist, and last time I was in the US I did get pretty used to there being a constant supply of weak coffee with near-zero effort.

In the EU it’s no longer even possible to buy a machine that stays on and keeps the coffee warm for longer than about an hour due to new regulations designed to cut power usage & emissions.

I have mixed feelings about that - but ultimately I guess it’s good for the planet.

isn't like, an enormously overwhelming % of climate change just caused by corporations, though?

Corporations producing things for consumers and having devices in stand-by. It's not like those things are unrelated or that you can completely ignore one side.

Yes of course, it was all the evil corporations, they forced us to buy nice things, eliminate most hard labor and be able to travel orders of magnitude faster than pre-industrial people. Let's dissolve all corporations and problem solved. Thanks!

not at all where i was going with that, just think a personal "carbon footprint" is dumb

chill.

For a drip machine, I have a Mr. Coffee that uses a stainless steel carafe that uses its thermal properties to keep the coffee hot. I find that I prefer that over the more typical glass carafes anyway for multiple reasons. Two include that there is no chance of breaking the carafe and also I think coffee continuously heated by the glass machines develops a kind of nasty burnt flavor, which is making the already bad drip coffee taste even worse.

Ultimately the steel carafe only keeps the coffee hot for about 3 hours after brewing but for something with zero heat applied after brewing it's not bad, and the flavor stays decent.

I guess one downside of the steel carafe is that if you have coffee older than that there's no way to turn the heater on to warm it back up, but I just pop it into the microwave if that's the case.

For those interested in hacking an espresso machine, check out https://gaggiuino.github.io/#/

> I hope Andy's ok.

If his house did burn down, at least he died an Internet hero.

I'm as much a fan of needless hacking as anyone else, but when the end result is a bitter, burnt cup of coffee you just have to draw the line and get a better machine.

I graduated to french press in my early 20's, eventually moving to moka pot and finally arrived at the chemex. Shame that pour over's aren't easily automatable, though I'm sure with the right machinery a proper pour over robot could be achieved. At that point I'd just be buying an espresso machine though.

Also, I'm not even sure I'd want to automate the pour over. There's something just distinctly meditative about performing the pour over ritual

Low tech way: cold brew a strong beverage, have hot water in vacuum flask/thermos. Mix.

If lack of acidity is the goal, it's tough to beat a good cold brew.

Am I the only locked in a captcha loop while trying to read this article :(

Oh fucking hell. This was a repeat of one of the first non private uses of the Internet. If glad you learned something, but nothing novel or new here. .

> After it has finished making the coffee, it will keep the coffee warm using its hotplate, but only for 25 minutes. If you want to make a batch and drink it over the course of the morning that’s far too short.

Ack, I try to keep my coffee snobbery in check but this one was too much for me. Use a thermal carafe or mug to keep your coffee hot - coffee sitting on a hotplate for hours belongs nowhere but the sink.

What's the theory behind a thermal flask being somehow better than a heated plate? Convection in the liquid? Venting of volatile compounds?

I didn't really know the answer to that but I found this online: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-reheated-coffee-tastes-ba...

I do know that while I love espresso I don't have a particularly "discerning palate" (many of the lighter roasts that seem to be so popular among fancy coffee shops taste far too sour/acidic for my liking), but even I can taste the grossness of coffee that has been sitting on a hot plate too long. It just tastes really "burnt", bitter, and acrid.

Somehow?

I just assumed applying heat to something is very different than letting it stay the same temp by keeping it insulated.

From the perspective of a molecule of water, I don't think you can tell whether the wall you are in contact with was heated by other molecules like yourself, or whether it was heated by an electrical resistor sitting behind it. It's just stainless steel at 95C or so that is touching your cheek.

My Italian mother worked in the coffee industry for years and she taught me just one thing: Filter coffee tastes awful my son. Only Germans, your granny and Americans drink it. An she is right :D /s

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