MisterH1337 Why is this the culprit in your opinion? as I see it it’s just a PCB with deterministic software flashed on it, what could be “wrong” with it that it needs replacing?
- Information from the temperature sensors has to be interpreted by the Gicar
- There are some mechanical relays that must operate
- Components can and do fail which may further affect operation, probe logic, fill logic etc. Imagine if the tank low signal was occasionally interpreted as empty by the box for very brief periods, this would create a fault condition which would generate no error code.
- The box may have been flashed incorrectly
- Pin connections on the box might be faulty and subsequent connectors on the internal boards may have a dry joint
I think during the Pandemic, lots of things suffered and there may have been issues around production, or batches of components purchased from china etc.. I’m just guessing with this,
So in my experience there are a lot of things that can happen and Gicar boxes today are not a 90% chip on board solution, it has been developed on from the logic used in the early RL30 boxes.. The Gicar used in the minima not only has PID logic, but display driver logic, power triacs and other things inside, which makes it twice the size of other Gicar boxes.
The Lelit Elizabeth, which is super reliable in the terms were talking about has the standard basic Gicar functions, but all the clever stuff is controlled by the LCC, which is a mostly Chip on board device with a 64 bit risc architecture and extremely reliable. I have heard of the odd LCC failing but it’s very rare.
Then you take a 3 group Orchstrale board as used on Vesuvius, Evo Leva and Vostok. That board is essentially unchanged from when it was first manufactured as a commercial board some 15 years ago. ACS just flash custom firmware to it. It’s expensive, no modern doodads…but immensely reliable, almost bulletproof.
I still want them to Make a MaraX plus,, with Elizabeth steam boiler 300 or 400 ml brew boiler, an LCC with Elizabeth logic and a much simplified Gicar….plus of course a solenoid E61….if I ever get out there post Covid, it’s something I will press again with Mauro.