Hi,

If this helps, here are some pictures of the GICAR that I ordered for my last project (lever GAGGIA).



































Congratulations bidoowee for your creation

Dynamos wrote:Hi,

If this helps, here are some pictures of the GICAR that I ordered for my last project

Hi Dynamos,

That is very interesting. I have nearly completed drawing the circuit of the Gicar board that I have. Your board is much cleaner and the design is simpler. Is there any chance you could take another photo of the component side so that the writing on the parts is legible?

Many thanks.

Oh wow - back in a flash! Thank you.

More and more interesting: the chip is an opamp.
Not quite sure what the yellow rectangular packages are. 100nK doesn't make any sense.
I assume that this is a capacitance divider circuit and the opamp is comparing a static ac voltage to one that changes when the probe leg is grounded. Which would make those yellow parts capacitors - but just a guess. I'll have a closer look later on.

100 nano farad 63V would be my guess, they are definitely capacitors, most likely polyester film, very stable for the cost.

Ira

And a zeiner for voltage regulation, very crude, but I guess more than adequate and at least in this one, the transformer is over specified enough it probably won't ever die, it's rated .5VA and it's using less than .1VA.

Ira

Depending on how good I could see the layout, I think it might look like this:



No values on parts.

Ira

ira wrote:Post by ira » Today, 2:33 pm

Depending on how good I could see the layout, I think it might look like this:

Thank you Ira for chiming in here. You seem to have a very good grasp of this stuff! Professional interest perhaps?
And very big thanks for drawing up the circuit. I have done the same thing with my older RL30 circuit which is a bit more complicated and uses a rather esoteric transformer.

bidoowee wrote:Speaking of the foundry: here it is! The square block at the top is the riser which provides a reservoir of molten metal that is drawn into the casting as it solidifies and shrinks. There seems to be a few slight dents in the cast, likely the wax pattern was dinged before it was put into the investment. They should come out in the polishing, though are couple are pretty deep. Now it is off to for machining.

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How much did it cost for the custom piece? So cool!

The cost is a little difficult to quantify as it involved a significant amount of time to measure, understand and draw the part, not to mention finding a supplier. Can we just say that it cost quite a lot more than is justifiable if one were only to make one group? Put another way, the prototype in this thread is a seriously expensive machine