Who should chip in the most to restock the community coffee supply at work is a common point of contention at some offices. This RFID infused coffee brewer called Juraduino by [Oliver Krohn] solves the issue at his workplace once and for all by logging how much is being consumed by each person and how often; quite the diplomatic hack.
[Oliver] donated his old Jura Coffee maker to his office with some added hardware cleverly hidden underneath the faceplate of the machine. An Arduino mounted within runs the show, powered through mini USB from the logic unit of the coffee maker itself. Once a co-worker swipes their RFID card over the front of the machine, a real-time clock module stamps when the coffee was requested, and then logs the amount selected by that person on a mini SD card. The data stored is sent via an additional bluetooth module to a custom app [Oliver] created with MIT App Inventor for his phone which displays the information. These details can then be exported in the form of an email addressed to everyone in the office at the end of the week, announcing definitively who can be counted on to restock the bulk of the community supplies.
Though there isn’t a link available with further documentation, [Oliver] mentions in the ‘details’ portion of his video that he’d be happy to share that information with anyone who contacts him regarding the project. You can see the Jura at work below:
Next step – put an ESP8266 in it and order coffee on your way home :-)
Of course, this would be possible and would be funny. But beside of that it does not make sense to use an app to let the coffeemaker start brewing.
My next step will be to build something similar, which is using the service port of the coffeemaker. This means: full control and no need to modify the coffeemaker itself (guarantee!). The device will then be an external one.
I will have to add a function to register new cards via the “coffee administrator” app.
I think I’ll develop an arduino to track roosters. C*ckduinos FTW!
I know I have a problem, no need to track it.
That’s exactly what’s needed in our office, we keep track of consumption using paper and pens.
I had already prepared the rPi & RFID for this, wrote a little web server and client and was going to connect everything, but the issue was how to make the data persistent and accessible from the office (think corporate networks).
In the end I’ll probably switch to an ESP8266 as it’s cheaper and smaller and seems the right fit for the job.
I used an SD card reader to make the data persistent, but there are other ways. For my project, I used a SD card module, because I added a timestamp, card number and cup size to the log. But I did not expect, that many people do not like others to know when the drink how much coffee (NSA syndrome?^^). It would be possible to use prepaid cards with a given value (e.g. 10 USD) and just to substract every cup and only safe the remaining credit. To do this you can write to the EEPROM. The data is still there, when you power off and on again. And you can write to it, while the device is running. Check out the EEPROM library! ;)
I forgot to mention: in case you use an Arduino. With a rpi: where is the problem? I did not use an ESP8266 before, so I cannot say much about it.
Many cafes will be needing that machine. We even need it at home. We are all coffee lovers at home and we cannot count how many times we make coffee before the day ends. This machine is very ideal to those who are looking for the right coffee brewer.