Sunday, December 10, 2017

Keurig WiFi Coffee Machine


So we all want a wifi enabled coffee machine, and there are some promising things on the horizon (spinn looks cool https://www.spinn.com/coffee-maker but $300 is a lot to spend, right?)

I looked at taking apart the keurig so I could do this as seamlessly as possible, but the keurig is a complete pain to disassemble, plus the possibility of destroying it made me stop pretty quickly. So why not just read leds and push buttons.

So this consists of Snips on a Rasp Pi3 doing voice stuff, talking to HomeAssistant to send an MQTT message to a NodeMcu WiFi Microcontroller with a solenoid to press the power button. There are 3 light dependent resistors to read power, heat and water empty leds and feed that back. The other two leds are auto off (amateurs, amiright?) and descale which I didn't think were critical.

It just sits on top so I can take it off if I need to, etc. It still needs solenoids for actually brewing the coffee, but I wanted to make sure the solenoid I got could produce enough force before I bought more.

So now that it works, i need to mount it on an actual pcb and add the extra solenoids and come up with a cover for the whole shebang (all the parts will live on top), since the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is fairly low as it is. The nice thing is that you can still press the backside of the solenoids and access the buttons (like they did in the dark ages), so could conceivably be made pretty transparent.

Now I just need that robot arm to load the cups and put my mug in place. Maybe a cup warmer, so if I hit snooze it doesn't get cold? Maybe some sort of death clock? Bonus geek points if you get that reference.