Some people take their coffee grinding seriously. So what do you do when the hot new grinders automatically weigh coffee, and yours doesn’t? Well, if you are like [Tech Dregs] and the rest of us, you hack your existing grinder, of course. The link is to the source code, but for a quick overview, check out the video below.
In true hacker fashion, the first order of business was to pull a load cell out of a cheap scale. Originally, he intended to reuse the processor inside, too, but it was epoxied, so it was a good excuse to use some more modules. A load cell amplifier, an OLED display, and a tiny Xiao processor, which he describes as “ridiculous.” From the context, we think he means ridiculously small in the physical sense and ridiculously powerful for such a tiny board.
With the modules, the wiring wasn’t too hard, but you still need some kind of app. Thanks to App Inventor, an Android app was a matter of gluing some blocks together in a GUI. Of course, the devil is in the details, and it took a lot of “focused cursing” to get everything working correctly.
The coffee grinder has a relay to turn the motor on and off, so that’s the point the scale needs to turn the motor on and off. Conveniently, the grinder’s PCB had an unpopulated pin header for just this purpose.
This is one of those simple projects you can use daily if you drink coffee. We are always impressed that the infrastructure exists today and that you can throw something like this together in very little time without much trouble.
WiFi hacking coffee makers is a popular Java project in these parts. Upgrading a machine can get pretty serious with PID control loops and more.
