My espresso machine, a Sage Barista Express (also known as a Breville Barista Express in Northern America), has no smart functionality. Even though it heats up the boiler in minutes, it’s better to let the rest of the machine heat up too, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes. So my goal is to turn on the machine when I wake up, so it will have some time to heat up before I pull my first shot of the day.
Since the machine has electronic buttons, including the power on/off button, it should be a matter of just shorting the wires connected to this button to turn the machine on (and off).
I found a good tutorial on how to use a Shelly 1 on what I thought was the same machine, but got stuck on the part of the tutorial where the front panel (which holds all the buttons) is removed. Another user in the comments on that page also ran into the same problem, perhaps there are some differences between the US and the EU/UK versions of the machine.
However, I found an alternative method that doesn’t require removing the front panel (however, you do need to remove the top and back panels; instructions for which you can find on Youtube).
I pinged out the wires that are connected to the PCB of the power button module (there’s just enough room to stick two thin multimeter probes in), and found the wires that are switched by the power button. Looking from the front of the machine, these are the first and fourth wires from the left.
I piggybacked two new wires onto the existing wires. The existing wires plug into a connector that’s soldered on the PCB and there’s a bit of extra room to push in an additional solid wire next to each. Because it’s not possible to solder the new wires I fixated them with some hot glue.
The red and black wires at the top (which points to the front of the machine) are the new wires, the black and pink wires are the existing wires.
These wires get connected to the I and O connectors of a Shelly 1 (what’s nice about this device is that it uses a mechanical relay, so the connectors are isolated from the mains input).
To power the Shelly, I routed a power cable from the power button module to where the mains power cable enters the machine. I spliced the mains cable using wago connectors and added the power cable for the Shelly.
This is what the final configuration of the Shelly looks like from inside the machine (the empty connector on the right connects to a microswitch on the top panel; I also removed the knob that sets the grind size, to allow for a bit of extra room; the white cable leading to the Shelly is the power cable):
To get it working from HA, it’s just a matter of adding the Shelly, which I have configured as a switch that can be used in automations or from a dashboard.
I did add an automation that turns off the relay a second after it has been activated (so basically, it will always short the power on/off button for 1 second) to prevent confusing the machine’s firmware (it will think the user is long-pressing the power button):
- alias: 'Turn off coffeemachine switch after 1s'
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: switch.coffeemachine
to: 'on'
for:
seconds: 1
action:
service: switch.turn_off
entity_id: switch.coffeemachine
