Tbf this is a relatively fancy espresso maker.

If you're not drinking turbine coffee whats the point?

Looks like a "super automatic" espresso machine.

It grinds the whole beans and typically they also have a doser (measures the weight or quantity of the ground up coffee beans), then it tamps the grounds, brews the coffee (which is some at a specific temperature and pressure), then ejects the used up coffee puck in a bin in the bottom of the machine.

The mechanism for the automatic tamping, brewing (with pressure valve) and ejection is one very complicated piece as well as the controls for the motor that operates it. Then there's the temperature and pressure controls for both the brewing of the coffee and the milk frother the machine likely has.

Edit: Video with partial teardown and which shows how the internals operate

https://youtu.be/cknj9CKHJcY

I recently replaced the heating element in my delonghi coffee machine, and was also surprised to see how wild it was inside

@workerONE Officially, I'm a computer scientist 😉 But over the years, I've fiddled around with enough electronics and mechanical engineering as well that I'm overall pretty good at fixing stuff 🤷

@agent_flounder Yes, big kudos to DeLonghi as well. They could just have glued everything together into one big epoxy block, but no, they chose to make it actually repairable (and even let you buy replacement parts). 👌

@gronjo45 I'd say roughly an hour to take the cover off and find the broken valve, one week waiting for the replacement to ship, and half an hour to put it back in 😉