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      Open source espresso machine is one delicious rabbit hole inside another

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 28 March, 2023 - 17:41 · 1 minute

    Opened-up espresso maker on a kitchen counter

    Enlarge / How far is too far to go for the perfect shot of espresso? Here's at least one trail marker for you. (credit: Norm Sohl)

    Making espresso at home involves a conundrum familiar to many activities: It can be great, cheap, or easy to figure out, but you can only pick, at most, two of those. You can spend an infinite amount of time and money tweaking and upgrading your gear, chasing shots that taste like the best café offerings, always wondering what else you could modify.

    Or you could do what Norm Sohl did and build a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia . Here's what Sohl did, and some further responses from the retired programmer and technical writer, now that his project has circulated in both open hardware and espresso-head circles.

    Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino , a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill , a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

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      How a hacker turned a $250 coffee maker into ransom machine

      Dan Goodin · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 26 September, 2020 - 14:58

    With the name Smarter, you might expect a network-connected kitchen appliance maker to be, well, smarter than companies selling conventional appliances. But in the case of the Smarter’s Internet-of-things coffee maker, you’d be wrong.

    As a thought experiment, Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the $250 devices to see what kinds of hacks he could do. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite a lot. Specifically, he could trigger the coffee maker to turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly. Oh, and by the way, the only way to stop the chaos was to unplug the power cord. Like this:

    What a hacked coffee maker looks like

    “It’s possible,” Hron said in an interview. “It was done to point out that this did happen and could happen to other IoT devices. This is a good example of an out-of-the-box problem. You don't have to configure anything. Usually, the vendors don’t think about this.”

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