First steam!

First steam from Trammell Hudson on Vimeo.

We’ve been rebuilding an Astoria two group espresso machine at the NYCR space and have finally made steam and espresso with it after a few weeks of cleaning. The pressure-stat triggered at 1.5 bar and the boiler held the pressure just fine. The pump produced precisely 9 bar. The hot water tap even looked sort of clean! Now that all functionality has been restored it is time to start on the computer control.

The controller will need:

• Six relays (two heater elements, two group heads solenoids, one fill valve and one pump motor)
• Three thermocouples (one per group head and one for the main boiler)
• Two pressure measurement (one main boiler up to 3 bar, one for the group heads up to 15 bar)
• At least two switches
• A multi-line LCD
• Ethernet
• RFID reader
• An iPhone or Android app?