Hello All,
We’re currently up to Order 1091 which is around 535 machines shipped! That now puts us at 93% complete for batch 1. Of course, nothing is easy. We’ve run into some delays with switching to the Pressensor pressure transducer. This change was mentioned in the last email update and requires a bit of manual machining work on our end to get the integration that we prefer with a direct thread into the Grouphead. We were originally expecting to receive parts customized for the Argos, but unfortunately that did not work out so we had to modify the first 30 units by hand. On top of this, we’ve been waiting on the new thread adapters to use the Pressensor with our current “T” fitting for those that want to run it with an analog gauge. We’ve been making those in house as well but the first batch of fittings have just arrived which will make shipping those out slightly simpler.
Hiring
This past month we’ve hired 2 new people! One is a part time developer with Argos experience who will focus specifically on the app side of things. We’ve got a significant list of our own features that we would like to offer in the app to continue improving user experience but we also need someone dedicated to keeping up with various scale pairing updates and phone compatibility issues.
The second hire is a full time assembly technician. We interviewed several excellent candidates and found one that has a blend of coffee experience and high attention to detail which is crucial for building these machines.
While it will take time for both new hires to get completely spooled up, we’re excited to be able to continue slowly ramping up our production as orders steadily increase.
We will likely hire another shop staff in a few months to continue increasing output without compromising quality.
Production
We expect to complete batch 1 assembly within the next 2 weeks. We will still have enough parts for around 50 units that we will use to start fulfillment of batch 2. The remaining Batch 2 parts will be arriving at the end of September and include some design changes geared towards simplifying assembly and reducing part cost. With these changes in mind assembly and fulfillment rate should increase once we receive the final shipment of these new parts.
Our goal is to complete batch 2 assembly by the end of January if we hit a steady 25 machines per week. Best case scenario, we will ship more per week with our increased staff but our current rate should be a reasonable estimate with a full stock of new inventory.
Maintenance
I’ve finally filmed and uploaded an Argos cleaning and routine maintenance protocol. We’ll work on transcribing this into a simplified written list for future reference. Apologies for the poor audio!
Video: Odyssey Argos Routine Maintenance
Shop Updates
Carousel: We’ve been slowly working on building a carousel system for our Quality Control rack. Machines all go through 2 rounds of testing before they’re boxed up. With limited shelf space, it can be a pain to store machines 2 deep on a rack and need to shuffle them around throughout this process. A simple carousel rack will allow us to prevent accidental damage from shuffling machines by hand and make it much easier to spin machines around for access, especially while we bond on serial plaques.
Hydrostatic Test Rig: Our current hydrostatic test stand up until now has worked great but is a little…janky. Basic wood frame bolted to an old crate with quick clamps and a rubber plug to seal. One of our techs, Anthony, has done a fantastic job redesigning the stand. We’ll now have it mounted to a mobile cart with its own faucet, drain, and pump to be able to recycle our testing water and prevent unnecessary walking across the shop!
Chain driven carousel with soft plastic 3d printed bases to securely hold machines in place. This will be mounted to the shelf when completed.
Initial mock up of the hydrostatic test stand to securely mount and seal the machines at multiple different build stages.
Software
1) One of our biggest updates to roll out is Classic Mode. We’ve realized that the most significant part of the Argos that people struggle with is around the varying boiler pressure. Unfortunately this is a sacrifice when favoring thermal stability on a dipper machine.
It appears most common for people to struggle when pulling many consecutive shots to dial in, or those that try to keep the machine on continuously instead of pulling their shots immediately when at temperature. To improve this experience, we came up with Classic Mode which can be turned on in the Odyssey Espresso App. This mode will work as a hybrid between our default Argos logic which favors thermal stability and a classic dipper lever machine that runs off of constant boiler pressure. The way we’re doing this is adding a lower limit to our default logic so that the machine operates the same UNTIL the boiler pressure is told to drop below 112C, then it holds. We’ve found that 112C is a reasonable limit to keep boiler pressure between 1-1.5 bar which is on par for other dipper style levers on the market. Learn more about it here https://www.odysseyespresso.com/argos-classic-mode
With a few weeks of testing this on our shop machine that sees 3-8 shots randomly across a 12 hour day, we’ve noted no negative impact on the quality of our shots with Scace results reading 94C shot temperature on a 50C grouphead temperature. I will release a video voiceover walking through the steps to update in your app and explaining the features in a bit more depth.
2) BooKoo Coffee (https://bookoocoffee.com/) seemingly came out of nowhere with their small form factor and low cost bluetooth scale and pressure transducer. We had some samples sent over to us for testing and have integrated both of those into our app.
BooKoo Coffee Scale connected to the Odyssey App with one of our Dev Boards.
3) We've added a minimum duration for auto stop which should make sure that when you're doing a Fellini or pressure/flow drops during puck saturation your shot doesn't stop prematurely. The default is 10s but you can change it as shown in the first screenshot.
We've also added boiler status to the brew tab so that its clear when its heating up, ready at temp, and cooling down. You can find this in the top left hand corner above the plot. A future enhancement will be how far from the target set point we are! 2nd, 3rd, 4th screenshots.
Shoutout to our new part time developer @slarsbot who implemented these two features and the customizable start/stop thresholds we released a few weeks ago!
Random
Below is a sneak peek of a 3d printed prototype for our new drip tray design. This design was inspired by one of our customers, Jake G, whom we’ve consulted with in the past on several small engineering changes. We’ve moved the recessed cutout in the drip tray back slightly to allow the drip tray to sit more centered under the Grouphead. An indent in the back of the drip tray will allow it to sit nicely against the front cover. The Cover features a more functional hole pattern to catch the drips while still looking stylistically appealing and having a finger cutout.
These drips trays will be backwards compatible with original machines. We will offer a Base Plate filler block on our site in the 3 color options. These will have an offset magnet to allow the new drip tray to sit flush on the surface but still held in place magnetically. To clarify, this block would sit in the recess location that the current drip tray lives to create an almost flush look in the appearance.
One of many drip tray cover designs that were tested for appearance and splatter.
Auto Refill is still in testing and we aim to release the kit by the end of the year.
Clever customer setup with a wall mounted tablet to show stats. I’ll need to do this for the shop machine!
Sincerely,
Ross & William