Decent Espresso Channel

Here are some photos of the R&D process happening for the infrared milk sensor, that will fit on Bengle. It can read the temperature of the milk without being immersed in it.

Steam can auto-stop at the temperature you want, there's very little cleanup, and the steam wand remains pro and easy to move, unlike steam wands that embed a temperature probe in the wand itself.

Bengle : steaming a latte in 10 seconds.

I just received my Bengle at home, and I was a bit surprised at how fast the steaming was. I asked my wife to video me. The foam quality was quite nice.

It's a bit disconcerting to tap the steam button and not hear anything until suddenly the steam starts. That's because we made the pump really quiet.

This is a beta machine, as I'm one of the app programmers. We might add some "stuff is happening" sounds so you don't wonder if your finger press wasn't registered, and we'll also work to shorten the delay between tap to steam coming out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gijXvsZ22eo

The Nine Bar Question : my thoughts on Lance's video

Lance's recent video on "Why 9 bar?" brought up new research I didn't know about. I dug into the topic, what Gagné has written on the topic, and what our own Decent customers' shots tell us by using Visualizer.coffee's API.

Here's the full article:
https://decentespresso.com/blog/the_nine_bar_question

Note: I discussed the pre-publication article with Lance yesterday, and he provided extensive and very helpful feedback.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s8dLJ_iVKBw

The secret to massive press (and I've gotten a lot of it): be really, really interesting - Guy Kawasaki's version is "if you're not getting press, get better reality" - and then convince just two influential bloggers. Media cascades: each outlet watches the next. For print, focus on freelancers rather than staff writers, because freelancers have to find and pitch their own stories, so become a cause a freelancer would personally care about.

For Magnatune, the cascade ran Creative Commons and Boing Boing → The Inquirer → Fark → Slashdot → USA Today / NPR → the New York Times → the BBC, Le Monde, Die Zeit and Nikkei. My elevator pitch was simply "We are not evil." BookMooch's was "Give a book away for free, and you can ask someone to send you a book for free."

The whole point: don't borrow money - because if you fail, you can just start again next week.

Employees Suck! Presentation at Le Web conference.

In December 2008, Loïc Le Meur invited me to speak at LeWeb in Paris. I'd spent a dozen years running a 50-person company that made good money and made me miserable, and then built Magnatune and BookMooch - real businesses, break-even and profitable, with essentially no employees. So I gave a deliberately provocative talk called "Employees Suck" about a completely different model for running a company, and running your life.

Here it is, with the original slides synced back in. The talk runs about seventeen minutes.

The argument, in short

Managing people is no fun: it's getting people who don't really want to do their job to do it anyway. What is fun is coordinating a handful of talented people who don't need to be motivated. Firing is worse, and in most of the world it's hard to do at all. So keep a small, culturally-homogeneous core - three people, sometimes one, rarely more than ten - to make the actual product, and work with freelancers for everything else. The model is Hollywood: assemble the exact team a film needs, make it, disperse.

Bosses suck even more, if you're the employee. Nobody can actually work eight hours straight. If you're genuinely talented you're probably worth 10× more than anyone else on the team, but you'll be paid at most 3× - usually 20% - more, and always less than your boss. You're paid by the hour, not for your contribution, so there's no incentive to be clever or do great work. The way out: stop selling your time, which is cheap and hard to value, and instead make intellectual goods and sell them for what they're actually worth - something the internet has finally made possible for one person to do.

And then a set of harder questions. Do you enjoy your life? Your work? Do you want kids - and the schedule freedom to actually raise them? Do you like learning new things? Employers don't pay you to learn; they pay you to put the hours in.


The steps to self-employment

Think of lots of ideas. Write them down. Read science fiction and futurism, watch TED talks, keep a list.

Then do nothing - for a while. Most of those ideas will look like garbage in three months, and it takes six-to-nine months for the good ones to cohere. People who jump on their first idea stop thinking of better ones.

The pub test. Explain your best idea, in fifteen seconds, to a cynical friend in a noisy English pub while they're drinking. If they don't put the beer down and pay attention, the idea isn't good enough. A noisy pub full of distractions is what the internet is like.

Then build the pitch, not the product. Write the elevator pitch, then the first line of your press release, then the first paragraph of your home page, then the home page itself - before you build anything. Companies that write the press release last discover their product is boring when it's already too late to change it.

Do it absurdly cheaply. Don't borrow money - so cheaply you don't need anybody else's money. Make a mockup, show it to people who might buy it, and launch long before you're ready. Pitch bloggers. If nobody cares, you've only lost a few months and you've learned why: kill it and start again.

Don't quit your day job. Work evenings and weekends, gradually lower your day-job commitment, and only quit once the project pays more than the job does


Getting press, and salespeople
Salespeople are a bad idea: they cost capital, and needing them usually means your idea isn't good enough to sell itself. "We just need more PR and marketing" is the same fallacy. Great products build word of mouth - if the product were great, your early users would already be blogging about it.

Bengle's first complete espresso

Yesterday, we finally made our first espresso using a fully functioning Bengle espresso machine.

Everything is working: the pumps, the profiling, the built-in scale, the cup warmer and the coloured LEDs. It's running our next-gen Decaid app with the new Streamline skin over a USB connection (Bengle supports both USB and Bluetooth tablet connections).

You can hear a faint hum of air conditioning in the background and occasionally a pump piston retracting. The loudest sounds, however, are the water valve opening at the start and, even louder, the espresso coffee dripping into a cup.

Yes, we wanted to start shipping this machine two months ago and we're obviously behind schedule. In fact, we had originally planned to ship it much earlier with a vibe pump.

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Why so late?

Eight months ago, I announced that we had changed our plans and would not be shipping the Bengle with vibe pumps. Instead, we had finished R&D on our own water pump design and we'd be delaying Bengle's launch in order for it to have this far-superior pump from the beginning.

This new pump design has the virtue of being
* practically silent
* perfect smooth flow
* accurate flow control from 0.1mL/s to 20mL/s

The technology is essentially two piston pumps (like on a lever machine), with one pump working while the other retracts.

There is a visualized simulation of it on our blog.
https://decentespresso.com/blog/bengles_dual_lever_pump_explained


In June, our first pumps finally failed our stress tests after producing 17,000 espressos. While this might be acceptable for some home users, we felt it was not good enough and made another revision to the pump. Note that Bengle's pump is covered by our two year warranty (or a forever warranty, if you so choose) so these issues are our problem, not our customer's.

The second pump revision arrived a few weeks ago. This solves the failure mode that we observed, which was due to wear on the piston seals. We now use a different manufacturing approach to ultra-polish the rubbing surfaces.

However, we found it very difficult to install the new piston seal material reliably; two out of three attempts failed. We reached out to our suppliers and the manufacturer examined our design, sharing their hard-won knowledge of how to design the seating to make this much easier. The revised parts are on their way and will arrive in four weeks.

We have now tested everything else in Bengle and it works. We have therefore told our suppliers to make the remaining parts (9 different PCBs and the pump motors). The final pump bodies will be ordered in about four weeks, but they are made using CNC technology and are quick to produce.

In terms of scheduling, the last parts (the pump motors) will start arriving at the end of November, so we expect to start shipping Bengle in December. We will have 500 of the v1.0 models, and we expect to start building the v1.1 models in March. These will also be available in black. We intend to make the v1.2 models in June.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently, but I thought it would be boring for most of you to read about the "problem of the week." I thought it would be better to wait until I had concrete news and a real timeline.

-john

New: shot history graphs on the web

Ever since reading Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information, I've wanted to view my espresso shots with a "ghosts from the past" approach. Lines from many previous shots are faintly drawn, but in such a way that as each line crosses over another, it makes the result darker. This lets you compare the current espresso to your past ones, simply communicated.

All our customers now have access to these cloud-based visualizations in our latest apps.

In the graph above, looking at the end of the shot's flow, you can see that this shot ran a bit faster than the others : it's a an outlier. At the time, noticed a lower part of the untamped coffee grounds, and... yes, it did result in a slightly faster (likely slightly side-extracting) espresso.

This chart is the start of many cloud-based features we'll be offering, for free, to all our espresso machines owners.

If you login to your account on our website, you'll now find a "Your Espresso Machines" button. If you're running the current version of Decaid, or the Nightly version of the de1app, you have a "Shot uploader" extension that will send all your espresso to the Decent Espresso Cloud. It'll also send (over a few days) your back-history.

de1app big release: iPad, OSX, Android APK, Linux -- all working, with bluetooth

The "classic de1app" got a big refresh today, with quite a few new releases. https://decentespresso.com/downloads

tldr: the de1app is now fully functional (talks to your DE1 and scale) on modern iPads, old iPads, Mac OSX and Linux. And there's an easy-to-install Android APK now available.

- the iPad version is now stable and ready for use. One click install from your Mac using SideStep (no jailbreak, you enable the "developer mode" option in your iPad settings)
- There's an "old iPad" release for those of you with 32bit iPads sitting unused in a drawer.
- I have a white iPad 1 mini that works well with this. You have to jailbreak it with Phoenix and then the de1app an easy install with Cydia.
- The Android APK version is now stable and fully functional (ie bluetooth) and can be downloaded and then installed directly from your Android web browser
- the Mac OSX version is now stable and fully functional (now has bluetooth)
- the

Streamline app demo now live from your web browser
at https://decentespresso.com/downloads you'll find a TRY IT NOW link.

Clicking on it and you can now use the full Streamline skin (with a fake DE1 attached). Hopefully, useful to those considering buying one of our espresso machines.

Hopefully, useful to those considering buying one of our espresso machines.

This is our next-generation software, now in beta, running on all OSes.

You can even go to https://decentespresso.com/download/streamline_demo/?page=settings and change the skin to "dark mode", and it remembers that change every time you come back. Kinda cool. I didn't include any way to switch to the six other skins the community has developed, but you can download the "Decaid" app https://decentespresso.com/downloads if you want to try that (there's an espresso simulator in that too).

Espresso Profile Generator preview

Several years ago, coffee researcher (and roaster known as "The Picky Chemist") Stéphane Ribes wrote a Decent Espresso Profile Generator, which asked questions like "roast level", "origin", what flavors to highlight, then making an appropriate profile for those beans. Amazing!

However, being standalone, and needing you to import the generator file into the app, it didn't get as much use as it should.

Now, recently hired Decent programmer Sascha, has made a first pass at using AI to rewrite Stéphane's work, to run inside our new Javascript-based Streamline App.

It's not yet in the app, but here it is running in this blog posting, so you can see how it works, and what's coming.

Visit our blog to try the interactive version.
https://decentespresso.com/blog/espresso_profile_generator_preview

Miklos from Pressensor sent me this video of new features that he added to our half-decent scale.

He's able now to connect to a pressure sensor that you plug into most any older espresso machine to get live pressure, flow and weight readings directly on the scale display.

He tells me he entirely vibe coded it and he's going to release it publicly shortly.

It's a really great example of how open source and AI Can allow you to easily create new things.

https://youtube.com/shorts/paptcgqFL_k?feature=share

BengleWand on the DE1: our hands-on experience

Our redesigned Bengle steam wand is now available as an upgrade for all our DE1 espresso machines, in 3-hole or 1-hole versions. It's also available as a customization option for new DE1 owners, at a lower price than the DIY upgrade.

- The 3-hole version of the Bengle wand 20% to 30% steams faster than the default versions.

- It has a non-stick tip: milk wipes clean off and doesn't heat up.

- A redesigned-by-us ball joint is more maneuverable, sits flush to the machine, and doesn't heat up.

- A redesigned "cool touch" system that now can't be damaged when removing the tip for cleaning.

How much faster are the new steam wands ? What does it feel like to use them? This is what we found out.

Read more on our blog:
https://decentespresso.com/blog/benglewand_on_the_de1_our_handson_experience

Heater capability simulator

Our DE1 and Bengle espresso machine models are available with 3 different heater wattages, for a number of different worldwide electricity voltages.

People have been asking us: "how fast can I heat water?" The answer is complicated without a bunch of mathematics and a physics model. So we wrote one for you.

Find this simulator on our blog:
https://decentespresso.com/blog/heater_capability_simulator

Here is the BengleWand vs DE1 steam wand test data. Default tip, vs 1 hole tip vs 3 hole tip.
- Improvements range from 28% to 40% faster on XXL.
- Improvements range from 27% to 35% faster on 220V XL.
- Improvements range from 26% to 25% faster on 120V XL.
- Note that 1 tip on XXL results in worse results. This is because the heater cannot dissipate its own heat fast enough, so it overheats and shuts itself off temporarily for safety.
- 200g of water was heated in each test.