Bengle's first complete espresso
Yesterday, we finally made our first espresso using a fully functioning Bengle espresso machine.
Everything is working: the pumps, the profiling, the built-in scale, the cup warmer and the coloured LEDs. It's running our next-gen Decaid app with the new Streamline skin over a USB connection (Bengle supports both USB and Bluetooth tablet connections).
You can hear a faint hum of air conditioning in the background and occasionally a pump piston retracting. The loudest sounds, however, are the water valve opening at the start and, even louder, the espresso coffee dripping into a cup.
Yes, we wanted to start shipping this machine two months ago and we're obviously behind schedule. In fact, we had originally planned to ship it much earlier with a vibe pump.
Why so late?
Eight months ago, I announced that we had changed our plans and would not be shipping the Bengle with vibe pumps. Instead, we had finished R&D on our own water pump design and we'd be delaying Bengle's launch in order for it to have this far-superior pump from the beginning.
This new pump design has the virtue of being
The technology is essentially two piston pumps (like on a lever machine), with one pump working while the other retracts.
There is a visualized simulation of it on our blog.
In June, our first pumps finally failed our stress tests after producing 17,000 espressos. While this might be acceptable for some home users, we felt it was not good enough and made another revision to the pump. Note that Bengle's pump is covered by our two year warranty (or a forever warranty, if you so choose) so these issues are our problem, not our customer's.
The second pump revision arrived a few weeks ago. This solves the failure mode that we observed, which was due to wear on the piston seals. We now use a different manufacturing approach to ultra-polish the rubbing surfaces.
However, we found it very difficult to install the new piston seal material reliably; two out of three attempts failed. We reached out to our suppliers and the manufacturer examined our design, sharing their hard-won knowledge of how to design the seating to make this much easier. The revised parts are on their way and will arrive in four weeks.
We have now tested everything else in Bengle and it works. We have therefore told our suppliers to make the remaining parts (9 different PCBs and the pump motors). The final pump bodies will be ordered in about four weeks, but they are made using CNC technology and are quick to produce.
In terms of scheduling, the last parts (the pump motors) will start arriving at the end of November, so we expect to start shipping Bengle in December. We will have 500 of the v1.0 models, and we expect to start building the v1.1 models in March. These will also be available in black. We intend to make the v1.2 models in June.
I apologise for the lack of updates recently, but I thought it would be boring for most of you to read about the "problem of the week." I thought it would be better to wait until I had concrete news and a real timeline.
-john
john created 2026/08/20, john updated 2026/08/21