Leader in the design and production of professional espresso machines
Gruppo Cimbali is one of the leading manufacturers of professional machines for making coffee and milk-based drinks, as well as coffee shop equipment, with four distinguished brands: La Cimbali, Faema, Casadio, and Slayer. Its mission is to anticipate customers’ needs with innovative, superior-quality products and outstanding service.
Gruppo Cimbali has a long history of working with Qt, dating back to 2010. In 2022, they decided to enter the commercial program to take advantage of the full professional offer of Qt products and libraries. Read their story to learn what competitive advantages Qt delivered to Gruppo Cimbali.
50%
Increased productivity, with Qt Design Studio automatic code generation
60%
Less code with Qt built-in solutions
50%
Faster time-to-market
Qt Solution Highlights
User-friendly technology, easy to learn, well documented, with a wealth of examples from the Qt Community
Great out-of-the-box libraries and robust, effective APIs for ready connection to the backend
Advanced graphics capabilities for building elegant UI applications with little effort
Cross-platform compatibility for deploying the same app to different devices and form factors
For us, choosing Qt was a no-brainer. Qt has all you may need to build beautiful UI applications with very little effort. There is much going on inside our coffee machines that users don't imagine. Qt's connectivity libraries make interfacing with sensors, boards, and the cloud a breeze. There is good documentation and such a wealth of examples in the community that it's difficult to get stuck with development.
Dario Costa, Senior Software Engineer, Digital Touchpoints System Manager, Electronic & Digital Solutions Dept.
See La Cimbali Model S and its beautiful touch-screen display
The history of professional and consumer coffee machines
With its professional models on the market for over a century, Gruppo Cimbali represents the history of Italian coffee. Today, this global, multi-product, multi-brand group delivers high-quality, innovative coffee machines for professional and home use. And when speaking of quality, with Gruppo Cimbali it's not only about brewing coffee. The overall elegance of the machines, their seamless functionality, and level of automation all make the difference in delivering unparalleled products.
The digital UI with touch screen plays an integral part in the game. At Gruppo Cimbali, UI applications have been successfully built with Qt since 2010. The UI design stands out and it's essential to be able to create an elegant, refined look-and-feel efficiently and without added complexity.
With its neat, declarative syntax, QML is the natural candidate to compose the UI visual elements and connect them with backend functionality implemented in C++. The ready-made modules and libraries included in the Qt framework make connectivity with sensors, boards, other machines, and the cloud easy to achieve, even for junior developers, who benefit from the solid documentation and broad community.
When working on a wide product portfolio, scalability across hardware and re-usability of software are key factors. Qt cross-platform framework allows to create software for the whole Model S series at once and to deploy it to the different hardware and form factors of the various models with great efficiency.
Dario Costa, Senior Software Engineer, Digital Touchpoints System Manager, Electronic & Digital Solutions Dept.
The future of coffee machines
In its constant strive to anticipate customers’ needs with innovative, superior-quality products, Gruppo Cimbali understands how commercial tooling can enhance quality and reduce production efforts and costs.
By subscribing the commercial Qt license the group gained access to the full Qt offering, including, among other things, Qt Design Studio and a variety of software quality assurance tools. While setting up the tools and new workflow, expectations are high at Gruppo Cimbali for the range of opportunities opened by using tools that automatically convert designs into code and thoroughly test the software with accuracy and completeness.
We are quite excited about the new opportunities offered by accessing the full Qt commercial offering. We already love QML for delivering beautiful UI applications so efficiently. But we see a huge potential in the availability of integrated QA and testing tools.
With Qt Design Studio, its automatic code generation, and enhanced design-develop workflow, we may be easily saving 50% of the development time. And there are other tools in the commercial package to monitor actual in-market usage or for in-app advertising that we are eager to try.
Dario Costa, Senior Software Engineer, Digital Touchpoints System Manager, Electronic & Digital Solutions Dept.
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