From Microfoam to Microflow

Part two: Continuous Espresso Deployment

Installing the Gaggimate Pro & Brewing in the Cloud

A few days after hitting “publish” on Part 1, a small package arrived from Italy: my Gaggimate Pro modification kit. This is the point where curiosity meets commitment.

Installation: Easier Than It Looks (Mostly)

The documentation claims you can install the kit in under an hour, even without electrical expertise. Let’s just say: maybe, if you skip the OPV install. The base kit is straightforward—watch the walkthrough video, follow the diagrams, and you’ll be up and running quickly.

The Pro kit? That’s where the real tinkering starts. Installing the OPV on a pump with pre-soldered wiring is… fiddly. The kind of fiddly that eats up two-thirds of your installation time.

Flashing the software to both the PCB and touchscreen was refreshingly simple—just plug into a Chrome browser via USB and let it do its thing. No hunting for drivers, no cryptic error messages. Roughly three hours after I started, the Gaggia was back together and looking smarter than ever.

First Power-Up

There’s always that moment before you flip the switch—half excitement, half fear. My mind flashed back to rewiring my old Isomac, turning it on, and instantly blowing the fuses for the whole house.

This time? Success. The fridge kept running, the lights stayed on, and the Gaggimate touchscreen lit up like a tiny espresso mission control. The only hiccup: the 3D-printed touchscreen case is just a bit too snug to sit perfectly on top of the Gaggia. That’s a job for sandpaper and future-me.

Brewing Meets Networking

Of course, the real reason for this whole upgrade wasn’t just fancy pressure profiling. I wanted the Gaggia online, publishing live brewing data to the cloud, so I could log every shot in a Mendix app.

In Part 1, I laid out the idea of connecting the Gaggimate directly to AWS IoT Core via MQTT. In practice, it wasn’t quite that simple. AWS IoT Core requires TLS encryption with certificates and keys—great for security, but not supported by the Gaggimate’s Home Assistant MQTT plugin, which only works with username/password authentication.

The solution? A middleman—my trusty, slightly dusty, 7-year-old Raspberry Pi, now promoted to kitchen IoT hub. It would run a local MQTT broker to talk to the Gaggimate and bridge messages securely to AWS IoT Core.

Setting Up the MQTT Bridge

I installed a fresh OS on the Pi (the old one was far beyond apt-get rescue) and added Mosquitto, an open-source MQTT broker. Setup is straightforward, and there’s a great tutorial here.

Mosquitto supports bridging, which means it can forward any messages from the local broker to AWS IoT Core. Configuring this involved AWS CLI setup, creating the IoT Core instance (credit card required, but there’s a generous free tier), and linking the certificates. Full AWS bridging instructions are here.

Once connected, the first messages started flowing to AWS:

• boiler/temperature – current water temperature
• boiler/targetTemperature – target temp for the current profile
• controller/mode – standby, brew, or steam
• brew/state – shot start/stop events with timestamps

That last one will be gold for the Mendix app, marking the exact window to log each espresso shot.

What’s next?

The hardware is installed. The Gaggia is online. The MQTT bridge is running. Now it’s time for the fun part: building the Mendix app to subscribe to those AWS IoT Core topics, log each shot, and let me add all the tasting notes and metadata my inner espresso nerd demands.

That’s Part 3—where the coffee meets the low-code canvas.