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decent_espresso
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#1: Post by decent_espresso »

John Buckman here, the founder of Decent Espresso.

I'll be posting regular Decent news to this Marketplace thread.

I'm also happy to answer questions here. However, there are Decent conversations happening in various places on this forum, among regular forum members, and I'd prefer to have the conversations remain there, and I'll keep out of the way.

As a vendor, I won't normally be participating in the other forum conversations, except to answer questions that "an official Decent representative needs to answer". I might post those answers here as appropriate, and just post a link on the original thread.

I prefer to leave the forum conversations remain among enthusiasts, and keep commercial conversations over here.

If you do need me to answer on a forum thread, please send me a direct message with a URL to that thread, and I'll get right on it.

-john
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decent_espresso (original poster)
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#2: Post by decent_espresso (original poster) »

I've been holding regular Zoom calls, where everyone interested (owners and Decent-curious) are invited.

They tend to alternate time zones between "USA/Arab world/Asia" and "USA/UK/EU". I am returning to HK next week (I'm in California now), so the regular times will likely change.

The next one is tomorrow, timed best for USA/UK/EU.



Zoom call tomorrow, for USA/UK/EU

Time: Jul 18, 2020 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Time: Jul 18, 2020 6:00 PM UK Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86057696447

There's been a lot of new Decent things released recently, and I'll go over all of them.

An archive of the call will be posted, and those questions that I manage to answer coherently will get separated out into separate, short videos.

-john

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HB
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#3: Post by HB »

Welcome back! There are quite a few Decent Espresso fans among the HB membership and your regular updates will certainly be appreciated. :D
Dan Kehn

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decent_espresso (original poster)
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#4: Post by decent_espresso (original poster) »

The zoom call turned out to be mostly me talking, answering tons of good (and sometimes difficult) questions. Normally we get more a dialogue going, as we usually focus on coffee making together.

I've cut the answers up into short videos, in a big playlist. Here they all are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYCp__RdVCI

Below I've put a few in that I think are the likely most interesting to an HB audience.

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decent_espresso (original poster)
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#5: Post by decent_espresso (original poster) »



The most beautiful coffee cart award goes to:
https://www.instagram.com/alwaysdialingincoffee/

with COVID and no more access to cafes, he decided to make his own cafe, at home.


smite
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#6: Post by smite »

John,

Glad to see you back here at HB. I want to first thank you and the Decent team for what you have done. I have to say that the Decent makes amazing espresso and clearly you and the team have delivered a good deal of capability and innovation way ahead of others in the industry. Nothing else on the market offers so much information on the process of making espresso.


Thanks again, I greatly do appreciate all that you and the team have done.

John

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#7: Post by decent_espresso (original poster) »

Hi John,

At the time I wrote that message, we hadn't even yet shipped a machine. I had hoped we'd be able to offer real time control via bluetooth, and in fact, the firmware does support it. However, bluetooth is limited to 10hz, or 10 messages per second, and what's more, if you send more than that, messages get dropped. Temperature, flow and pressure data are coming over bluetooth and using all that bandwidth.

So, I haven't yet released a UI feature to do what you suggest: full real time control of the DE1 over bluetooth. I programmed it at one time, and it was incredibly buggy, due to technology limitations of bluetooth.

I'm sorry, I haven't been able to get you what you're asking for, for technical reasons I didn't foresee way back then. We might find a way to solve it in the future, but R&D is not always successful.

We will be offering "proceed to next step" in the profile via the tablet, as a free software upgrade. And likely some sort of bandwidth-limited real time control. But you'll never have fast real time control over bluetooth. It's just not possible.

Another possibility in the future is wifi and usb control over the DE1, via an external dongle. When that happens, we'll be able to do faster real-time control over v1.0/v1.1 machines, without the limits of Bluetooth.

Sorry I wasn't able to deliver on everything you wanted.

If you're disappointed, I will buy back the machine at the price you paid for it, and pay for shipping to pick it up. Ie, a 100% refund.

-john
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PIXIllate
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#8: Post by PIXIllate »

decent_espresso wrote:Hi John,

If you're disappointed, I will buy back the machine at the price you paid for it, and pay for shipping to pick it up. Ie, a 100% refund.

-john
WOW!

If I ever had any doubt about my second machine being a Decent they just got a lot smaller. That is, as long as you don't go broke from customer service before I'm ready to buy one.

liquidmetal
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#9: Post by liquidmetal »

PIXIllate wrote:WOW!

If I ever had any doubt about my second machine being a Decent they just got a lot smaller. That is, as long as you don't go broke from customer service before I'm ready to buy one.
Had my DE1Pro for 9 months now. This is not the first time I've been impressed by John's commitment to his customers. This is, without a doubt or competition in my eyes, both the best espresso machine in the world and the best coffee company in the business.

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#10: Post by decent_espresso (original poster) »

Moving to the new factory

We have 70 DE1 machines built and waiting for burning in, calibration & testing, so we used this opportunity to finally move our factory.

We took possession of the new space 4 months ago. We'd have moved sooner but we've been too busy building machines.

We also spent a lot of time planning how it should work, with everyone chiming in on multiple successive drafts and revisions, until we came up with this.




and here's what it looks like now. Airy, bright, clean, lots of windows. And space for more machine-building-and-testing staff. We'd stopped hiring people for the factory, as we couldn't fit them in.




Bugs and I are moving back to Hong Kong this sunday. We'll be meeting, face to face, quite a lot of new people, as we've been away 14 months. It was supposed to be a shorter time, but COVID changed plans a bit.




For a comparison, here's what our old factory looked like:

Our "boxing" room has become crazy crowded as sales have zoomed up, due to the COVID-caused "make coffee at home" trend. We really can use the extra space.




We now have enough space to mark areas for different versions of machines (here: v1.1 vs v1.3) and you can walk around everything now.




We're keeping old factory, and converting into a warehouse for our accessories.

We also gain enough space to get our lunchroom back. A core part of each day was eating our lunch together, with the cook we hire who comes each day to do so. It was really a shame when, last year, we lost the lunchroom to store espresso machine suitcases.

Thankfully, all 3 spaces we rent are adjacent to each other. We've renovated, knocked down walls, and made them all connected. It helps that our landlord is crazy for coffee and even bought one of our machines.

-john

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