Our new "Decaid" app now talks to grinders
Today a big new feature dropped: community-written drivers for coffee grinders.
With smart grinders from Mahlkonig, Bentwood and Bookoo now appearing (and more coming!) we wanted to have a "driver architecture" like Windows has, where anyone can write a driver for a device, and it just works with our app.
With the Decaid app, anyone can write a device driver in Javascript, host it on Github, and Decaid can use it. This takes Decent of the middle, empowering people to write what they want without our involvement.
Another big feature that just launched in Decaid is the ability for extensions to cleanly modify the user interface of the app.
For example, this grinder supports both grind-by-weight and highly-accurate burr spacing definition. An extension both talks to the grinder and shows (and sets) both these settings in Decent's Decaid software. Tap a button to make that coffee, and the dose and grind move along with it.
The driver tells the software what features it supports, so the app can support just those. For instance, if your grinder does only "grind by weight" or perhaps "tell me the burr spacing" then the app can implement just that.
By building on top of Github, we're also enforcing both the open source nature of the work, but also letting anyone improve on anybody else's work.
This new mechanism is not limited to only grinders, but we started with them, as that's the most obvious use.
I've previously mentioned how our new app "Decaid" (our new app after 10 years of the de1app) is a from-scratch rethinking, and runs on all OSes.
john created 2026/10/19.