felixrieseberg/strumento

Strumento is firmware that turns a cheap handheld gadget into a custom display for La Marzocco home espresso machines, including the Linea Mini, Micra, and GS3 models. It adds things the machines themselves do not show on their own, such as an analog style dial for the boiler temperature, a shot timer, and quick access to settings like power, steam, pre-brew, and backflush mode. To build one, you need a roughly fifty dollar device called the M5Stack Core2 and a USB-C cable. The firmware is written against a library called M5Unified, so other boards in the same family, such as the Core2 v1.1, CoreS3, and Tough, should also work with only a small configuration change, and the author lists the general hardware requirements for anyone who wants to port it to a different board entirely: an ESP32 chip with WiFi and extra memory called PSRAM, a 320 by 240 touch screen supported by a graphics library called LovyanGFX, and about 2 megabytes of flash storage for the firmware itself. The ready made web installer, however, only supports the Core2 board directly, so any other board needs to be built from source using separate instructions in the project. Installing the firmware is done through a web page in the Chrome or Edge browser: you plug the device in over USB-C, open the installer page, connect to the right serial port, and click install, which the README says takes about ninety seconds. On first boot, the device shows a setup screen where you type in your WiFi name and password along with the email and password from your existing La Marzocco app account, since the device needs to log into both your home network and La Marzocco's cloud service to talk to your machine. Support varies by machine model: the Linea Mini has been fully tested, the Linea Mini R and Linea Micra are expected to work, and the GS3 AV and GS3 MP models are untested. The project is written in C, has 15 stars, is released under the MIT License, and states that it is not affiliated with or endorsed by La Marzocco.