Be careful what you say when you are shown a commercial product that you think you could make yourself, you might find yourself having to make good on your promise.
When he was shown a crowdfunded alarm clock coffee maker, [Fabien-Chouteau] said “just give me an espresso machine and I can do the same”. A Nespresso capsule coffee machine duly appeared on his bench, so it was time to make good on the promise.
The operation of a Nespresso machine is simple enough, there is a big lever on the front that opens the capsule slot and allows a spent capsule to drop into a hopper. Drop in a new capsule, pull the lever down to load it into the mechanism, then press one of the buttons to tell it to prime itself. After a minute you can them press either of the large cup or the small cup buttons, and your coffee will be delivered.
To automate this with an alarm clock there is no necessity to operate the lever, it’s safe to leave loading a capsule to the user. Therefore all the clock has to do is trigger the process by operating the buttons. A quick investigation with a multimeter on the button PCB found that the voltage present was 15 V, well above the logic level of the STM32F469 board slated for the clock. Thus a simple circuit was devised using a MOSFET to do the switching.
Finally, the clock software was created for the STM32F469. The chip’s 2D graphics acceleration hardware and the development board’s high quality display make for a very slick interface indeed.
You can see the resulting clock in the video below the break. It’s an alarm clock coffeemaker we’d be proud to have beside our beds, but there’s one slight worry. On a mains-powered device like the Nespresso the low voltage rails are not always mains-isolated, and it’s not clear whether or not this is the case. Maybe we’d have incorporated an opto-isolator, just in case.
Nespresso machines have featured here before a few times, from this circumvention of their annoying security screws, to a handy tool for identifying which of the colour-coded but annoyingly unlabeled capsules you have before you.
The STM32F469 have Ethernet, so, next step, implementing RFC2324 :)
Request For Coffee 2324 ?
It’s the IETF document descriptive of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
That would scare the crap out of me if it started up next to my head.
But neat idea though :)
Gotta kickstart that heart before pumping it full of caffeine you know ;)
I thought about doing the same, but with the grinder and be woken up by the smell of freshly ground coffee. Not a good idea ….
That really is heck heck of a sound to wake up to!
Reminds me of Michael Scott’s injury from the George Foreman grill.
Sounds a bit unnecessarily noisy to me too. Maybe its intentional to make it sound more powerful and industrial and hence expensive.
One things can be said *sip* people sure do *sip* love their coffee. *sip*
I sure love coffee hacks, more than most people. However, “fresh coffee” means recently roasted and freshly ground — not nespresso… I gotta admit it’s easier and more convenient to press a button than to grind, tamper, extract and cleanup with a proper espresso machine.
+1
Nespresso coffee:
Taste -1
Aroma +10
Ain’t real coffee but smells better than the real one. :-)
It is even more convenient to press one button to grind, press, extract and cleanup with a proper fully automatic coffee machine. I would not buy this less convenient but overpriced Nespresso stuff.
Glad to see an old fashioned build that’s not cloud-something
Nice Teasmade.
Nespresso ≠ espresso
That’s right! And K-Cup ≠ coffee.
Apparently the masses love sludge.
+1 fellow coffee aficionado.
Nespresso is not k-cup plastic sludge
I used to think Folger’s was the best part of waking up, but now I have found something superior!