There’s no shortage of cool coffee makers, gadgets and gizmos. This is just another one, but one that you can potentially hack together yourself at home one day.
Inspired by the automatic lever mechanism of the Meticulous Espresso Machine, we wondered why how no one had thought to make something like it before. After canceling a preorder on Kickstarter to buy our own Meticulous, we figured we could try to make something more affordable but similar in principle using the AeroPress.
Nour Malaeb and Michael Atme are a couple AeroPress enthusiasts, fascinated with the idea of turning the simple handheld coffee maker into an automatic espresso-like coffee machine using off-the-shelf parts that anyone can hack together.
This page serves as our public living document of our progress and how we’re doing with this project.
Note: we’ve taken a slight detour from building our own brewer from scratch and opted to build the Gaggiuino project to take learnings we could apply to our own.
<aside> ☕ Update February 23, 2024:
A month later than scheduled, the Gaggiuino project is complete! We’re going to walk through the decisions we made and our experience of the build.
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While impressively well-documented, the Gaggiuino project is more “choose your own adventure” than an exact guide. We had to make several key decisions early, with implications on how the rest of our build would go, starting with the most important - which Gaggia espresso machine were we going to modify?
The machine.
Each Gaggia machine has its quirks when it comes to modifying for this project, so we spent some time on researching which options were best suited. We opted for a newer Gaggia Classic Evo Pro due to its wide availability, and for its improved build quality and improved boiler coating (which had been issues in previous models #BoilerGate).
The stock Gaggia Classic Evo Pro
The espresso machine arrived in mid-January, and Michael enjoyed it in its stock form for a few weeks while he and Nour waited patiently for the parts they ordered to arrive. Speaking of which…
The bill of materials.