Something about the Jura Giga X8
Hey Guys,
today we’ll share some information about the Jura GIGA X8 Professional which can be useful if you like to dive deeper into hacking your X8.
Service-Interface
The GIGA X8 Professional has its service interface in the back of the machine, hidden behind the Jura-Logo. Its a standard D-SUB 9 serial connector but be careful, Jura doesn’t use the standard PIN-Layout. The guys at Q42 already wrote a great Blog entry about the interface. For further information, please take a look at their Blog entry.
Product codes
The GIGA X8 has 8 buttons beside its display to quickly choose a product. Our coffeemaker came preconfigured with 31 products. In order to select a product which is not reachable through one of the 8 buttons you have to spin the wheel on top of the machine. The wheel gives you access to all products.
Let’s take a deeper look at the product choice and how the product is reported to the payment system over the serial line.
A product may be assigned to each of the 8 button on the front of the GIGA X8. When pressing one of theese button the coffeemaker sends a corresponding product code to the serial line. For the GIGA X8 there are 8 productcodes relating to the 8 button and one for all products which are not directly assigned to one of these button. So it’s not always possible to correctly identify the chosen product as long as the product carousel isn’t deactivated. The productcodes are assigned beginning from the upper left with the code ‘PAA’. The button below sends the code ‘PAB’. The button down right sends the code ‘PAH’. The image above shows a complete mapping of the codes to buttons.
We already mentioned that products chosen from the product carousel, to which you get by turning the wheel upon the coffeemaker, always get the productcode ‘PAJ’ as long as the are not also mapped on one of the 8 buttons. In consequence we are only able to identify the 8 major products. All other will lead to productcode ‘PAJ’ and we’re not able to determine which product was selected exactly.
But what does this mean? In our office we wanted to be able to assign every product a individual price. This does work great, as long as you deisable the product carousel and only focus on the 8 major products. But if you want to make use of a wider range of products, you won’t be able to give each prouct a individual price.
Power supply The service interface on the back of the Jura GIGA X8 also has one line which gives us +5V. Unfortunately there is no specification available so using this line to power a microcontroller may be a dangerous proposition. Anyway we decided to use this line to power our NodeMCU microcontroller and the peripheral equipment like the TFT-display and NFC-cardreader. We haven’t measured the power consumption yet but we detected no issues with the power supply so far.