Nicholas DiPatri's RoboGaggia Automates a Gaggia Pro Coffee Machine for Easy Breezy Espresso

Coffee enthusiast and Android engineer Nicholas DiPatri has taken it upon himself to upgrade a Gaggia Pro coffee machine to the max — creating the "RoboGaggia" in a quest for the perfect cup of joe.

"The Gaggia Pro is an amazing Espresso machine out of the box, but it requires a lot of manual steps involving measuring weight and time, clicking buttons and the result is 'pretty good espresso,'" DiPatri explains. "[Most] much more sophisticated and expensive machines do most of this for you… AND they do fancy additional things like modulate the brew pressure and temperature dynamically to make sure the espresso is being extracted at a consistent flow rate, temperature, and time. My goal was to improve the Gaggia to achieve all of these goals."

The RoboGaggia goes beyond a simple functionality upgrade, though. Leaning on his experience as an Android engineer, DiPatri uses a Particle Argon's Wi-Fi connectivity to add real-time telemetry to the low-cost coffee machine — allowing for details including flow rate, water temperature, pressure, extracted weight, and more to be published over a network and analyzed in search of that perfect brew.

On the more immediately practical side, the RoboGaggia automates a lot of the steps which were previously manual on the stock machine. There's a scale integrated into the drip tray for automated measurement, there's a PID-based flow-rate controller, an auto-fill water reservoir, a fully automated brew process, a cool-down system for alternating between brewing and steaming without over-stressing the single boiler, and even an automated cleaning feature.

"This project involves modifying a perfectly safe commercial espresso machine. These modifications absolutely make your espresso machine less safe," DiPatri admits. "It involves both water and electricity. Please proceed at your own risk. This is a dangerous modification! If you don't do it right, people will die over a cup of coffee!"

The build stands on the shoulders of earlier efforts to upgrade machines from the same manufacturer, in particular the Gagguino project — an effort to replace enough of the electronics inside a Gaggia Classic or Classic Pro to have it go toe-to-toe with professional-grade machines at a considerably higher price tag.

For those not put off by DiPatri's warnings, full details are available on the project's GitHub repository alongside 3D-printable files, circuit board designs, and source code under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.