[Andrew Robinson] and his co-workers are lucky enough to have a Keurig coffee maker in their office, though they have a hard time keeping track of who owes what to the community coffee fund. Since K-Cups are more expensive than bulk coffee, [Andrew] decided that they needed a better way to log everyone’s drinking habits in order to know who needs to cough up the most cash at the end of the month.
He started by tearing down the Keurig B40, making note of the various PCBs inside while identifying the best way to go about hacking the device. The coffee maker is controlled by a PIC, and rather than try to re-engineer things from the bottom up, he left the core of the machine intact and focused on the control panel instead.
He disconnected all of the unit’s buttons from the control board, routing them through an Arduino before reconnecting them to the machine. This essentially rendered the machine inoperable unless triggered by the Arduino, giving [Andrew] control over the brewing process. He wired in an RFID reader from SparkFun, then got busy coding his security/inventory system. Now, when someone wants coffee, they merely need to swipe their office access card over the machine, which enables the use of its control panel.
As you can see in the video below the system seems to work well. If we were to offer some constructive criticism, we would suggest ditching the laptop and rolling the RFID reading/verification into the Arduino instead – other than that, we think it’s great.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jI1n5lJCzHs&w=470]
Cool, but I’d suggest letting it get to a warmed up state before you swipe your card. That way, you don’t have to wait.
Now I just have to resist the temptation to rip my B40 apart……
Two problems:
What about the guy who brings his own K-cups? Still has to pay the coffee fund?
Also, wouldn’t it have been easier to just wire the button to a wifi webcam, so when somebody turns on the coffee maker, you have a mug shot? Facial recognition in photo organizing software works pretty well these days.
Code it so his tag doesn’t add to the fund?
Do you really think facial recognition would be more efficient than swiping a card? The banks obviously don’t think so…
Efficient? Not so much. But fast, easy, and cheap, and nobody needs to carry around their RFID tag to get coffee…
Could be you have the RFID tag anyways. I’ve worked places where you need the tag to basically get anywhere, even had a place where if you forgot your tag (you could go through one way without) you would be trapped until someone let you out.
“Mug Shot”
Hilarious.
While I don’t want to detract from how cool this is, I have to ask what kind of office doesn’t pay for the employee’s coffee? Even the inflated cost of K-Cups is a small price to pay for keeping the employees productive and happy.
Agreed. Cool hack, though. But what a crappy office to charge employees for coffee.
It’s crappier than that. The office isn’t supplying coffee, much less charging for it. This is a private group of guys that are sharing a coffeemaker and freeloading coworkers have forced the guy to put a lock on it.
Maybe the coffee club is already organised by the staff. Could be nothing to do with their employers. I’ve worked in many offices with coffee clubs and it’s really annoying when people who aren’t in the club steal the coffee/tea/milk. Especially when they use the last of the milk. lol. This is a great system!
It’s actually a research lab at a University ;-)
There’s free coffee in the building, although it might not be made by the Keurig, and the hack was done in good fun. It’s certainly more about hacking things just to hack them, rather than solve a dire problem with people stealing K-cups.
The attitude approaching this hack is best described as ‘quick, let’s do something fun with RFID, look around the lab and invent a problem we can solve’.
Our PhD lab is in a small Aerospace department. We are not worthy of free coffee, lol.
I work for a notable IT company (that’s 3 letters long), my site of 1500 people has coffeee shops and machines I have to pay for. Even for hot water, kettles are also banned.
You can understand how valued I feel as an employee
Government employers are not allowed to provide coffee (or any other beverage, food, etc) to their employees.
Any government office. We have to fund our own coffee.
Unfortunately this won’t keep my wife’s co-workers from stealing her k-cups and using them in the other machine.
Well in the case make a vending mechine for the cups rather then haveing the coffie maker do everything =) You can good coffie pay for it or use someone else old cup that taste like crap
Does it implement HTCPCP?
I don’t think so, I tried implementing it, and it is really hard unfortunately :(
Cool hack. Now if someone could come up with a hack to make the coffee from a Keurig taste good… i’ll try to do both.
Yay! now all can share in the garbage coffee.
I’ll just grab a K cup, pierce the top and take out the “teabag” of coffee and seep it in the cup of hot water instead. Same quality without having the be “tracked”
so you’d drink the “garbage” coffee also then?
I would have just interrupted the switches for size selector. That way it will always be heated and it just won’t let you make the coffee.
couldnt you refill the k cups with bulk coffee?
yes, there is a refillable cup module you can buy.
Sadly, the refillable K-cups are patented… there’s a few models on the market, but they’re all outrageously priced at $15-$25. It’s just plastic!
(Man… wait till 3D printing is really ubiquitous… ‘pirate k-cup’ containers, anyone?)
why dont you just buy your own k cups and use the “office” machine. problem solved.
There’s actually a k-cup vending machine, which seems to be the best solution:
http://www.multi-max.com/vm816.php
interesting approach to an annoying problem! I would have opted for an rfid k-cup dispenser instead. Though his solution get more hacking points!
Sorry for being negative but it does seem like a very complicated and controlling way to handle such a simple problem.
If you bring in your own cups, just think of it as helping pay the power bill to run it.
the rfid chip should have been on the cup, so when you put your cup into the machine. the machine logs the cup owner, and it should as it was said, only have been size that was locked
K-cups are incredibly wasteful. The refillable cups are basically just a kludge to turn the machine back into a regular coffee maker. It’s really quite silly.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a decent hack, it just seems like a waste of talent, like building a teleporter then only using it to transport poop from your house to somewhere else to save on your water bill. :[
I used to agree with you, that the k-cup is wasteful. After all, that’s a lot of plastic cups which are not compostable/recyclable.
On the other hand – most of the carbon footprint of coffee can be attributed to the coffee plantations themselves, and secondly the shipping thereof. Most of a standard pot of coffee gets dumped down the drain… after sitting on a hot plate for several hours.
So anything which lessens coffee waste, and continuous heating, makes k-cup a less evil option. Aside from the freaking patents on the k-cups themselves, and the fact that most of the coffee vendors are owned by 1 company (green mountain coffee).
This is all true, but honestly I was thinking about all the wasted plastic. Coffee isn’t made of petroleum-based plastic.
Grumble grumble grumble…. A hack is a hack. Look beyond his application of the hack. Substitute coffee maker for home security system or office thermostat.
Yeah! Instead of a crappy coffee maker they should have done home security or an office thermostat! Right!
Absolutely GENIUS! This added brewer technology would go beautifully with the KCup Vending Machine from Multi-max… Ever heard of it? Check out their site, as I think you will find it rather interesting given your desire to control how the KCups in your office are being dispensed to employees…
http://kcupvending.com/
Next project – toilet paper dispenser.
Wish I’d have had this for the keg when I was in school.
Nah, RFID pay toilet plus a web cam in the crapper to charge by the deposit.
All those complaining about it tastes like crap, you should know that Dunkin Donuts makes k-cups too.