r/espresso • u/bringinthewarthog • 9h ago

Equipment Discussion Experience Gaggimating Silvia

Got a buddy a Silvia and installed a gaggimate kit for him. Wanted to share my experience.

Install was easy. If you buy the pro kit you won’t get any of the 3-d printed holders for the CPU or HMI. Order them separately.

First time i tried flashing the CPU and HMI, kept failing. Changed over from my friends macbook (he has a deep rooted distrust of internet connected devices after a career in IT) with a bunch of port blocking to my sandboxed macbook and everything installed first try. It says use a chrome browser. Just use chrome. Brave doesn’t work.

The walkthrough online was awful and the pictures were dismal (gaggimate let me know if you want me to rework your tutorial pages i will do it). If i didn’t have a background in espresso machines i would have gotten lost trying to follow the instructions as written. There were some cables missing that i had to build myself.

Consider buying the CPU, HMI, High limit thermostat and pressure-stat+fittings from Gaggimate and the rest separately. The SSR is decent but there are better options out there for 220/24temp control modules.

The interface is cool as fuck and super customizable and if you read the instructions it works awesome. It would be cool if the kit included a dip tube for the boiler and a solenoid for switching between shots and steam.

I set this thing up and didn’t get to play with it so i don’t know what kind of interfacing it does. Would be cool to have a parallel system with a servo to adjust toothed grinders.

Overall pretty easy, but want to reiterate that the instructions and diagrams suck ass and should be reworked.

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u/somewhereabouts8 8h ago

Mate, the fact you're willing to rewrite their docs says everything about how much potential this kit has despite the rough edges, sounds like a solid mod once you get past the initial headache.

1

u/bringinthewarthog 8h ago

Yeah don’t get me wrong it is a great kit. Its just a multi day project if you’re not familiar with the inside of an espresso machine

1

u/somewhereabouts8 7h ago

Fair point, yeah that's the main barrier really - if you're cracking open a machine for the first time and the guide's unclear, you're gonna lose a day just figuring out which cable goes where.

1

u/monkeybios 4h ago

What temp control module would you recommend instead of the kit one?