Will the DE1Pro 1.42 show quantities also or stay as "In stock" until sold out?

Short answer: we won't have quantities shown for any models before v1.43. The website will say "in stock" for all pre-v1.43 models, but no number.

I personally find deep accounting questions super interesting, because for me, accounting is like physics: a math/numerical simplification of reality, which makes insights possible. If that viewpoint sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend this book, which argues that European history is largely a product of the history of accounting in those countries:
https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financ ... 0465031528



Longer answer, for those interested in manufacturing accounting ...

• In quickbooks, the way we track machines changed with v1.43. I don't have visibility in quickbooks of how many machines we have, for machines before v1.43.
• with v1.43 we created an "internal customer" who buys the parts from us, and then returns a finished machine. That allows us to know how many finished machines we have.
• With v1.42 and earlier machines, we were never able to catch up with orders (demand outpaced supply) so we only tracked inventory of machines as we shipped them, which was a few days after we made each machine.
• Thus, with all our earlier models, in quickbooks, we list all the parts the person received as if they'd bought parts (and not a machine), and then discount the entire thing to reach the amount they paid
• This accounting method let us track our parts inventory, but it made for very large invoices for each customer, making quickbooks slow.
• With v1.43 every batch of machines is "sold" to the "decent factory" customer. I put the invoice into quickbooks, then fetch the journal entries that show me the actual this-very-moment FIFO price of every part. Then I update the internal invoice to reflect today's parts prices, and then update quickbooks.
• With v1.43 we're now able to exactly know what it costs us to build a machine, on that day. The total price changes daily as we consume parts from different supplier orders (there are 280 parts in a DE1)

To put a picture to it, here is an example of a quickbooks invoice to a customer, for machines before v1.43. All the parts are listed, and the invoice is not created until the machine is purchased. So, we had no visibility on DE1 inventory. However, we didn't need it, because all machines made were already pre-sold, so we had no inventory.



And as of v1.43, we now are able to make machines faster than we sell them (finally!) and so we immediately sell parts to ourselves, and return a finished machine. That puts DE1 into quickbooks' inventory, which I can then suck out via the QBO API and present to you on our website. Here are 25 machines of one model, being made:



Note that all this quickbooks stuff is created automatically by software I've written, which syncs the website database of purchases, with quickbooks. We have no manual data entry here, of any customer orders, payments. All payments are similarly automatically brought in.

Yes, this represents a massive amount of programming, but it means that we can keep things running smoothly here. Manufacturing complex objects isn't easy.

-john

Emmy's Decent Cartoon

Emirates-based cartoonist Emmy owns one of our Decent Espresso Machines. She's a coffee fan https://www.instagram.com/stories/highl ... 133013157/ and we're big fans of her cartoon series, which you can find at https://www.instagram.com/emmy.art/

In her cartoons, she explores Arab life from a woman's perspective: romance, relationships, children, pregnancy, couple's dynamics (in good times and bad). Besides being just plain fun, it offers the rest of us a view into Arab life that few of us know.

My only request, Emmy, can you put English subtitles in your Instagram posts, so that the rest of us can follow along?

On her website https://emmy.ae/ she sells a variety of products integrated with her art. I absolutely love her cup collection, which are adorable and fun, and definitely liven up the morning brew.





Find more of these cups at https://emmy.ae/collections/winter-collection

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Yesterday, the de1app (the Android app that talks to our espresso machine) got a new screen saver, drawn by Emmy herself. You can get Emmy's screen saver by choosing "nightly" and clicking "update". In a few months, it'll be in the "stable" app that everyone uses.

You can see it at the top of the photo above. It's chosen by the app automatically, among the Decent artwork that I commissioned years ago.

This is the first donated piece of art on the de1app, and I'm hoping it motivates other Decent owners with an artistic bent, to consider joining Emmy on the 5000 Android tablets making Decent espressos each day.

---

Next month, we'll receive a large format, variable power, laser etching machine that we bought. One goal with it is to work with artists to etch their designs on the Decent itself. We can't do color, but we can do levels of gray. Here are sample etches the company did for us, on our black (and white) main covers, to show what it's capable of.




I think that line art, with swathes of color, will work best. I'm hoping we can sneak into Emmy's busy schedule to work together on this.

-john

lol surprisingly it is kind of interesting to me... instead of building an end device out of components I have to deal with putting together a lot of end devices to make a system. And inventory management has been a pain to say the least. I've been meaning to look around at some cost effective way to build out materials list with more granularity so that when we do have some components that are required to actually be assembled it is shown more clearly and organized.

I guess a different way to ask would you happen to know roughly how many 1.42 units are remaining? I plan on putting an order in but I haven't been able to make up my mind on the accessories.

Thanks!

510kut wrote:lol surprisingly it is kind of interesting to me... instead of building an end device out of components I have to deal with putting together a lot of end devices to make a system. And inventory management has been a pain to say the least. I've been meaning to look around at some cost effective way to build out materials list with more granularity so that when we do have some components that are required to actually be assembled it is shown more clearly and organized.

Everyone seems to make their own huge Excel spreadsheet for this task. Google sheets works better, I've found, because of its integration with Google Forms, but also because it can automatically fetch .csv files off a URL, in a google sheet data cell. That makes for a simple way to integrate live data from other sources.

My preferred way to "program" a solution is to first prototype it, for a long time (6 months, at least) in Google Sheets or Excel. The staff in charge of the actual processes, who have real deliverables (get parts in time so factory doesn't stop) are those who author/revise the spreadsheets. Sometimes, the process never stabilizes, because reality is changing too often, and in that case, I never program it. Once it's programmed, it's inflexible.

510kut wrote:I guess a different way to ask would you happen to know roughly how many 1.42 units are remaining? I plan on putting an order in but I haven't been able to make up my mind on the accessories.

Yeah, we know exactly how many there are, because they've been photographed and inventoried in our "Showroom". You can seem them listed here:
https://public.3.basecamp.com/p/KTaSDBm ... TcDvB8pBkm

and after you pay for a machine, you're invited to choose the one you want, or have us choose one for you.

At any rate, we have a good stock of v1.42 in 110V, fewer in 220V.

Oh, and I guess I should now mention something (cough cough) as it's visible on the image below. In our experimenting to find front-panel vendors who could do mirror panels, we did get some "native" hybrid panels, where the mirror surface is on the metal itself, and not a glued on mirror. These are really nice looking.



We're also going to shortly have a few v1.42 DE1PRO machines with perfect mirror panels, about 60pcs of those, I believe. And then that will be the end of mirror panels, as they're not something we can get made now, in the post-COVID world.

-john

Hi everyone,

Just ordered the DE1XL and I am so exited to playing and enjoying with the machine.
And I also want to express my personal appreciation of how John and Decent approach the machine and operation as a company. As a entrepreneur myself I really like the transparency, innovation of Decent. I am also inspired by how Decent is working as a startup and a company and there are things I have learnt and hope to learn more as I am becoming a Decent machine onwer.

My inspiration for buying the machine is 50% by what the machine can do and 50% by the way the company is operating.

All the best to Decent and John.

Nam

"Insight Dark" - new skin for the de1app

Decent customer Martin Reuben and Alex Roys have completed the Photoshop work for a Dark Mode version of the Insight Skin, and I've finished programming it.

It's now available in the 'nightly' version of the de1app, and can be selected on the settings->app->skins page:

As the "dark skins" (DSX, Metric, SWDark) are all quite popular, I expect that Insight Dark will be as well.

Note that I have not made "Dark Mode" versions of the "Settings" section, as those pages (especially the shot editors) are still actively being changed, and it's a lot of work to keep two versions in sync of the same gui. When you go to "Settings" you'll be back to the usual color scheme.

I'm also continuing to work with Dennis Brekke on a mobile-phone (in portrait mode) version of the de1app and Insight Skin. There's good progress there, but that's a lot more programming work too, once the photoshop work is done.

-john

decent_espresso wrote: And as of v1.43, we now are able to make machines faster than we sell them (finally!) and so we immediately sell parts to ourselves, and return a finished machine.

Does that mean we can expect the DE1+ making a comeback soon (and perhaps a rough time estimate? )

Never say never, but no current plans. Philosophically, I did not like making a Decent that had less-long-lived components, and that's what we had to do, to lower the parts cost, and thus lower the retail price.

Espresso with smaller baskets, learning from Lever machines

Looking back at the history of espresso machines, and especially with lever machines, you find that the 58mm basket used on 9 bar machines, is not so common. Smaller diameter baskets are really common. And lever machines are known for making ultra-smooth, easy-drinking espresso.

I long thought that 53mm baskets (such as those on Dalla Corte machines) was something I wanted to experiment with. I asked Ben Champion Ben to draw me a design for a 58mm->to->53mm basket, but in the word of COVID, no manufacturer wants to play with pure R&D with us.

Last week, from our tamper supplier, in arrived a variety of 58m baskets that they make, that have smaller output diameters. We measured them at 37mm, 41mm, and 52mm.

Going from 58mm to 52mm may sound like a small change, but this presents a 25% reduction is surface area of holes. Holding the dose weight constant, you get a correspondingly thicker puck as well. Going from 58mm to 53mm with a 15g dose, gives you the same thickness puck as if you'd gone to a 18.75g dose in the 58mm basket. That's a big change.

Theoretically, thicker pucks should channel less. I've definitely noticed that our 10g basket is almost impossible to make good espresso in without channeling, and I've been wanting to work on that. My assumption is that the puck is just too thin and tends to fall apart very easily.

I asked my in-house coffee expert Paul Chan Paul to work with my engineer Alex Alex , and do some experiments. Alex previously designed a 3D-printable tamper specifically for our 7g basket, and I think special tampers will be needed for the baskets above too.

Initial tests gave us the results we kind of expected: the 52mm vs 58mm basket gave us a thicker shot, and much, much smoother, both at a 15g dose and the same grind. I've asked Paul to perfectly dial in the grind for each basket, and come back to me, as I think the 58mm basket will need a finer grind in order to be optimized, than the 52mm needs. I'll report back what we find.

Has anyone here also done comparisons of baskets that fit 58mm portafilter, but have a smaller bottom hole surface? What have you found?

We've absolutely found that how close the shower screen comes to the puck, greatly affects espresso thickness and the risk of channeling. I would expect that puck thickness would also have a strong effect. Thicker pucks should be easier to make, and smoother in flavor when using low doses.

However, if you move to 18g doses, I suspect that the 58mm basket is a more appropriate size. The puck would get too thick. Or will it?

Would love to hear from you on this, if you've tried these sorts of baskets, dialed in the grind, and compared.

-john