Repair And Reverse-Engineering Of Nespresso Vertuo Next Coffee Machines

January 21, 2026 by 34 Comments
Well there’s your problem. (Credit: Mark Funeaux, YouTube)

Akin to the razor-and-blades model, capsule-based coffee machines are an endless grind of overpriced pods and cheaply made machines that you’re supposed to throw out and buy a new one of, just so that you don’t waste all the proprietary pods you still have at home. What this also means is a seemingly endless supply of free broken capsule coffee makers that might be repairable. This is roughly how [Mark Furneaux] got into the habit of obtaining various Nespresso VertuoLine machines for attempted repairs.

The VirtuoLine machines feature the capsule with a bar code printed on the bottom of the lip, requiring the capsule to be spun around so that it can be read by the optical reader. Upon successful reading, the code is passed to the MCU after which the brewing process is either commenced or cruelly halted if the code fails. Two of the Vertuo Next machines that [Mark] got had such capsule reading errors, leading to a full teardown of the first after the scanner board turned out to work fine.

Long story short and many hours of scrubbed footage later, one machine was apparently missing the lens assembly on top of the photo diode and IR LED, while the other simply had these lenses gunked up with spilled coffee. Of course, getting to this lens assembly still required a full machine teardown, making cleaning it an arduous task.

Unfortunately the machine that had the missing lens assembly turned out to have another fault which even after hours of debugging remained elusive, but at least there was one working coffee machine afterwards to make a cup of joe to make [Mark] feel slightly better about his life choices. As for why the lens assembly was missing, it’s quite possible that someone else tried to repair the original fault, didn’t find it, and reassembled the machine without the lens before passing the problem on to the next victim.

Continue reading “Repair And Reverse-Engineering Of Nespresso Vertuo Next Coffee Machines” →

Damn Fine (Solar Powered) Coffee

November 19, 2025 by 30 Comments

The folks at Low Tech Magazine are here again, this time with a solar powered coffee maker. Lest you think of a large parabolic mirror with a pot at its focus, in this case the device is much more friendly. It’s a table-top appliance that relies upon a 100 W, 12 V panel for its operation.

They make the point that an electric coffee pot requires at least 300 W to work, so what’s the secret? In this case, insulation, as a standard moka pot is placed within a nichrome heating element set in mortar and surrounded by cork. On the outside are tiles, though they appear largely ornamental and the write-up suggests you could experiment with other materials to serve as an enclosure.

It appears to be an effective coffee maker, with the significant caveat that it’s hardly fast. In full sunlight the first pot takes over an hour to brew, with subsequent ones once it’s up to temperature being somewhat faster. But you can’t argue with the idea of free power, even if your favourite caffeinated beverage may now take a while to appear.

We like this idea, despite its slow brewing. We’ve featured Low Tech Magazine before, not least in their solar powered oven.

An Improbable, Doomed Star System In A Clockwork Coffee Table

November 13, 2025 by 6 Comments

The major objects in our solar system orbit along the plane of the ecliptic, plus or minus few degrees, and it turns out most exoplanet systems are the same — pretty flat, with maybe one highly-inclined outlier. But at [The 5439 Workshop], they don’t care about these details: [5439] has come up with a mechanism to drive inclined orbits in an orrery, and he’s going to use it. The star is exploding, too, because why wouldn’t it be?

While the cinematography of this build video might not be to everyone’s taste, it’s worth watching to see the details of the project. The sliding mechanism to “explode” the star by sliding plates across each other is quite well-done, although perhaps not much not designed for assembly (we’re quite impressed he got it together). It isn’t quite the iris we had expected, as there’s a double-ratchet inside to drive the slow collapse/fast expansion dynamic [5439] is going for. It looks more like the breathing mode of a cepheid variable star than an explosion to us, but it’s still a fascinating piece of laser-sintered aluminum.

The driving mechanism for the inclined orbits is fairly simple, but also worth examining, as we’re not aware of anyone having used it before. The gear rings holding the planets are tilted, and are driven by straight vertical shafts via gears that pivot on knuckle joints. It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s a big part of what makes this build unique. Since the solar system is very flat, clockwork orreries tend not to bother showing orbital inclination at all. Given the way planets are believed to form from a protoplanetary disk, a system with this many planets in such differing orbital planes seems unlikely to occur naturally, but it certainly adds visual interest.

We like model solar systems around here, be they made from brass and steel, molded plastic LEGO bits, or 3D printed and CNC routed aluminum like this one. That you can sit a coffee mug on it is just bonus. Continue reading “An Improbable, Doomed Star System In A Clockwork Coffee Table” →

BART Display

Real-Time BART In A Box Smaller Than Your Coffee Mug

November 11, 2025 by 27 Comments

Ever get to the train station on time, find your platform, and then stare at the board showing your train is 20 minutes late? Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may run like clockwork most days, but a heads-up before you leave the house is always nice. That’s exactly what [filbot] built: a real-time arrival display that looks like it was stolen from the platform itself.

The mini replica nails the official vibe — distinctive red text glowing inside a sheet-metal-style enclosure. The case is 3D printed, painted, and dressed up with tiny stickers to match the real deal. For that signature red glow, [filbot] chose a 20×4 character OLED. Since the display wants 5 V logic, a tiny level-shifter sits alongside an ESP32-C6 that runs the show. A lightweight middleware API [filbot] wrote simplifies grabbing just the data he needs from the official BART API and pushes it to the little screen.

We love how much effort went into shrinking a full-size transit sign into a desk-friendly package that only shows the info you actually care about. If you’re looking for more of an overview, we’re quite fond of PCB metro maps as well.

Franke A600 coffee machine with PicoVoice

Coffee By Command: The Speech2Touch Voice Hack

September 24, 2025 by 1 Comment

If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’. Now [edholmes2232] made it actually come true. With Speech2Touch, he grafts voice control onto a Franke A600 coffee machine using an STM32WB55 USB dongle and some clever firmware hacking.

The office coffee machine has been a suspect for hacking for years and years. Nearly 35 years ago, at Cambridge University, a webcam served a live view of the office coffee pot. It made sure nobody made the trip to the coffee pot for nothing. The funny, but in fact useless HTTP status 418 was brought to life to state that the addressed server using the protocol was in fact a teapot, in answer to its refusal to brew coffee. Enter this hack – that could help you to coffee by shouting from your desk – if only your arms were long enough to hold your coffee cup in place.

Back to the details. The machine itself doesn’t support USB keyboards, but does accept a USB mouse, most likely as a last resort in case the touchscreen becomes irresponsive. That loophole is enough: by emulating touchscreen HID packets instead of mouse movement, the hack avoids clunky cursors and delivers a slick ‘sci-fi’ experience. The STM32 listens through an INMP441 MEMS mic, hands speech recognition to Picovoice, and then translates voice commands straight into touch inputs. Next, simply speaking to it taps the buttons for you.

It’s a neat example of sidestepping SDK lock-in. No reverse-engineering of the machine’s firmware, no shady soldering inside. Instead, it’s USB-level mischief, modular enough that the same trick could power voice control on other touchscreen-only appliances.

A PC That Uses Hot Coffee As Coolant

August 7, 2025 by 38 Comments

Modern computers generate a great deal of heat when under load, thus we cool them with fans and sometimes even water cooling systems. [Doug MacDowell] figured that water was alright, but why not use coffee instead?

Someone tell us how [Doug] made this graph look like it’s right out of a 1970s college textbook.
The concept is simple enough — replace water in a PC’s cooling loop with fresh-brewed coffee. [Doug] fully integrated an entire PC build on to the side of a General Electric drip coffee maker. It’s an absolute mess of tubes and wires, but it’s both a PC and a functional coffee maker in one.

The coffee maker percolates coffee as per normal into the carafe, and from there, it’s then pumped through two radiators on top of the PC. From there, it circulates to the water block on top of the CPU, and then back to the carafe on the coffee maker where the cycle repeats. Doug notes the coffee is initially so hot (90 C) that the PC is at risk of crashing, but after 75 minutes circulating through the system, the coffee and CPU sit at an equilibrium temperature of 33 C.

You can’t really drink coffee from this machine. PC water cooling components are not food safe in any way, and [Doug] notes mold will become an issue over time. For short periods at least, though, it’s possible to sort-of-cool your computer with hot, fresh coffee if you really want to do that.

We’ve featured some great hacks of conventional coffee machines over the years, including this fantastic talk at Supercon 2023.

Continue reading “A PC That Uses Hot Coffee As Coolant” →

Lit up coffee table

Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute

July 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

One of the simple pleasures of life is enjoying a drive to work… only to get stuck in traffic that you could’ve known about if you just checked before your daily commute. Who are we kidding? There’s almost nothing worse. [Michael Rechtin] saw this as a great opportunity to spruce up his living room with something practical, a coffee table that serves as a traffic map of Cincinnati.

The table itself is fairly standard with mitered joints at the corners and coated in polyurethane. Bolt on a few legs, and you’ve got a coffee table. But the fun comes with the fancy design on top. A CNC-cut map of Cincinnati is laid out under a sheet of glass. Roads and rivers are painted for a nice touch.

Of course, none of the woodcraft is what gets the attention. This is where the LED light show comes in. On top of the map resides an animated display of either road conditions or the other five pre-programmed animations. The animations include color-coded highways or the good ole’ gamer RGB. To control all of the topographic goodness, a Raspberry Pi is included with some power regulation underneath the table. Every minute, the Pi is able to grab live traffic data from the cloud to display on top.

A looker, this project shows how our hacking fun can be integrated directly into our everyday life in more subtle ways. When we want to decorate ourselves, however, we might want to turn to more personal fare. Check out this miniature liquid simulation pendant for some more everyday design.

Continue reading “Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute” →