Victoria Arduino Eagle One Prima Announcement

#1: Post by **drH** » September 18th, 2020, 6:40 am

Does anyone have thoughts about this?

https://www.victoriaarduino.com/eagleoneprima/

There is surprisingly little information on specs. It looks like rotary pump, plumb or reservoir, adjustable brew temperature and preinfusion. It's unclear if you can adjust the brew pressure, but you can on the multi group version, and this single group is similarly digitally controlled so it makes sense that this will also be possible. If it has all of these features it could be a winner. At the very least it may offer proper competition to La Marzocco.

September 18th, 2020, 8:40 am

And of course James Hoffman's introduction:

#3: Post by **Jeff** » September 18th, 2020, 8:43 am

I'm not sure where you saw a single group offered. (Original link was to the two/three-group units released nearly a year ago.)

It's got some clever thermal management, as in lower power and water consumption, but otherwise it seems to be yet another multi-group machine.

James Hoffman goes over its design philosophy on his latest video. Something of a promo piece, but at least he calls out his involvement at the beginning. Edit: The timing of his piece on the series apparently coinciding with the release of a single-group unit moves it to a promo piece on his channel, in my opinion.

September 18th, 2020, 8:55 am

Jeff wrote:I'm not sure where you saw a single group offered.

Sorry that was the wrong link.. it's corrected now. This is the single group version.

#5: Post by **Quester** » September 18th, 2020, 9:28 am

I thought it was interesting that, after all the design around energy savings, the two-group and three-group machines have a 400 watt and 500 watt cup warmer respectively. Maybe there's an option to turn it off.

#6: Post by **adriahno** » September 18th, 2020, 10:22 am

I don't see anything related to preinfusion.

September 18th, 2020, 10:33 am

I believe in one of the videos they show some brief images of the app where something said "prewet". I inferred from that.... and also from the fact that the multi group machine does have preinfusion settings... it's hard to imagine them marketing this as innovative if it can't even do that. Maybe I'm being too generous in my assumptions/expectations?

September 18th, 2020, 1:29 pm

I had the chance to play with a 2-group Eagle One last month, but didn't have time to really dig into the settings. The machine was solid, everything felt great (ofc) but I didn't like the new steam wand toggle.

How does preinfusion on Eagle One and other VA machines (e.g the Black Eagle and White Eagle) work? Does it resemble LM Mini/GS3 AV with something like 3 seconds ON follow by 3 seconds off then brew, or 3 bar PI followed by full brew pressure?

IMO the VA machines are overpriced because they don't offer any advanced brew mode like flow/pressure profiling.

#9: Post by **Jeff** » September 18th, 2020, 1:56 pm

In defense of VA, their target market isn't the home barista. For budget-conscious cafés and roasters, a single-group machine that behaves like their front-of-house machine means they can both dial-in in the back, as well as have a machine they can bring out if their main one goes down.

#10: Post by **yakster** » September 18th, 2020, 2:04 pm

It was interesting to see in the Arduino video how packed with components the espresso machine is when they show it with the side panels removed. Lots of electronic modules wedged in there as well.

Here's an unboxing video promo piece from 2017 WBC Champ André Eiermann that followed the James Hoffmann video above when I was watching it on Youtube. This video didn't answer many questions for me but at least you see the machine in action.