Like us, [Alberto] doesn’t compromise when it comes to a good cup of coffee. We figure that if he went to an office in the Before Times, he was the type of coworker to bring in their own coffee equipment so as not to suffer the office brew. Or perhaps he volunteered to order the office supplies and therefore got to decide for everyone else. Yep, that’s definitely one way to do it.
But like many of us, he is now operating out of a home office. Even so, he’s got better things to do than stand around pouring the perfect cup of coffee every morning. See, that’s where we differ, [Alberto]. But we do love Cafeino, your automated pour-over machine. It’s so sleek and lovely, and we’re sure it does a much better job than we do by hand — although we enjoy doing the pouring ourselves.
Cafeino is designed to mimic the movements of a trained barista’s hand, because evidently you’re supposed to pour the water in slow, deliberate swirls to evenly cover the grounds. (Our kettle has a chunky spout, so we just sort of wing it.) Cafeino does this by pumping water from an electric kettle and pouring a thin stream of it in circles with the help of two servos.
The three buttons each represent a different recipe setting, which specifies the amount of water, the hand pouring pattern, and the resting times between blooming the grounds and actually pouring the bulk of the water. These recipes are set using the accompanying web app via an ESP32, although the main brain barista is an Arduino Nano. Grab a cup and check out the demo after the break.
Got an old but modern coffee robot lying around? You could turn it into a planter with automated watering.
I found a Black and Decker Home Cafe pod maker at the curb. I’d never use pods, fresh ground only. I took off some of the plastic under the pod part so I could get a Melita cone and a big cup under the drip zone. It works great and looks kitchen worthy. Load water and fresh ground and push a button. I don’t like the way it drips as I have to swirl the cone around for a while after it gets saturated. I will have to hack a way to distribute the water better now. I have thought of a “shower head” type of spreader so all the water don’t go down the middle of he grounds.
A shower head style thingy to disperse the water better and a pressure pump to force the water through at a better rate than just letting it drip through will help as well.
Coffee is for the weak.
Coffee is for the week.
Agreed, coffee is a drug, you build up resistance, after that you are just a junkie with black teeth.
The user interface looks nice; it’s more aesthetic than what I would have designed. And it’s nice to see something with such a practical use! (Practicality is definitely not necessary for a project, but it’s a fun plus when it’s there.)
Neat, i guess, but way too many steps still need to be done manually, and it does not seem that easy to keep clean with all the splashing of water/coffee going on in the video.
I would have at least expected that there is a water boiler included, maybe even one hacked out of an old coffee machine that had other parts fail. Would have the benefit that you could actually pump the water on the cold side of the boiler.
This looks fantastic, and similar to something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I like the use of servos to recreate the spiral pouring motion, it’s closer to what a human would do than a shower screen (although I don’t know which would produce better results). I wonder if a load cell underneath the jug would enable feedback to control the amount of water going in?
There’s no parts list. Try finding a small pump that can handle boiling water. I’ve been looking for half an hour and haven’t found one yet.