Caption CERN Contest Week 13

April 30, 2015 by Adam Fabio 9 Comments

Week 12 of the Caption CERN Contest and the strange stringed scientific instrument it brought along are both history. As always, thank you for your captions! They provided quite a few chuckles in the busy week gearing up for our Hackathon. We’re still not sure exactly what is being built here – Our best guess is it’s some sort of detector for emissions. But what sort of emissions? Was CERN looking for electric fields, magnetic fields, or something else entirely? It’s interesting to note that just as the photographer’s flash reflected in all 5 layers of wire, an RF signal would bounce off the rear reflector and strike the wires.

The Funnies:

“Ooh, it’s so beautiful, is this a harp?”
“Close, it is for HAARP” – [Federico Churca-Torrusio]
“Bones was right this thing will scatter your molecules across space.”- [scott galvin]
“Eight years of schooling and two post doctoral fellowships just so I can make quilts. I should have been a dentist.” – [Narfnezzle Nickerbots]

The winner for this week is [THX1082] with “CERN’s early attempts at developing “String theory”. They’re doing it wrong. [THX1082] will be at his next hackerspace meeting wearing a CRT Android T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store!

Week 13: Coffee time at CERN!

Every week we get at least one caption explaining that the strange piece of equipment included in that week’s image is a coffee maker. I thought it would only be right to include this shot of CERN’s real coffee nook, and a scientist about to enjoy a fresh cup of liquid “get ‘er done”. I have to thank CERN’s photographer for grabbing this slice of life shot!

It’s worth taking the time to check out the high res JPEG direct from CERN, as you can really zoom in on the post cards and photographs in the background. One even says “Tout va tres bien” – which Google translates to “Everything is going very well”. Some jokes never get old!

Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself.

As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Good Luck!

Brewdoo Helps Keep The Office Coffee Fresh

April 25, 2015 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Until about lunch time, the coffee goes pretty fast in our office. Only a few of us drink it well into the afternoon, though, and it’s anyone’s guess how long the coffee’s been sitting around when we need a 4:00 pick-me-up. It would be great to install a coffee timer like [Paul]’s Brewdoo to keep track of these things.

The Brewdoo’s clean and simple design makes it easy for anyone in the office to use. [Paul]’s office has two carafes, so there’s a button, an RGB LED, and a line on the LCD for each. Once a pot is brewed, push the corresponding button and the timer is reset. The RGB LED starts at green, but turns yellow and eventually red over the course of an hour. Brewdoo has a failsafe in place, too: if a timer hasn’t been reset for four hours, its LED turns off and the LCD shows a question mark.

[Paul] knew he couldn’t touch the existing system since his company leases the equipment, so the Brewdoo lives in an enclosure that [Paul] CNC’d with custom g-code and affixed to the brewing machine with hard drive magnets. Although [Paul] designed it with an Arduino Uno for easy testing and code modification, the Brewdoo has a custom PCB with a ‘328P. The code, Fritzing diagram and Eagle files are up at [Paul]’s GitHub.

Redundant Automated Water Filler For Your Coffee

January 6, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

We’ve always wondered why we have indoor plumbing if it isn’t hooked up to our coffee pots. We probably drink as much coffee as water anyway, so why not just hook up a water line to refill the pot? [Loose Cannon] aka [LC] has been working on just that problem, with a whole lot of extra features, creating a very robust automatically-filled, gravity-fed, vacuum-sealed water tank for whatever appliance you have that could use it, including your coffee pot.

[LC] tapped into the 1/4″ water line from the ice maker, which has the added bonus of being a common size for solenoid valves. He’s using an eTape sensor to measure the water level in the reservoir, but he ALSO is using a flow meter in the line itself to double-check that the reservoir won’t overflow. The flow meter allows a hard limit to be set for the maximum amount of water allowed into the tank. He’s used an Arduino Micro to tie the project together, which also handles a real-time clock so the tank can be filled on a schedule.

The tank that [LC] was trying to fill was vacuum-sealed as well, which made things a little trickier. Without a vacuum on the tank, the water would just run out of the overflow valve. This is an interesting project that goes way beyond the usual automatic water supplies for coffee pots we’ve seen before.

Coffee Payment System Doesn’t Void Your Warranty

December 27, 2014 by Rick Osgood 18 Comments

[Oliver] is back with an update to his recent coffee maker hacks. His latest hack allowed him to add a coffee payment system to an off-the-shelf coffee maker without modifying the coffee maker itself. This project is an update to his previous adventures in coffee maker hacking which logged who was using up all of the coffee.

The payment system begins with an Arduino Uno clone inside of a small project enclosure. The Arduino communicates with the coffee maker via serial using the coffee maker’s service port. This port is easily available from outside the machine, so you won’t have to crack open the case and risk voiding your warranty.

The system also includes an RFID reader and a Bluetooth module. The RFID reader allows each user to have their own identification card. The user can swipe their card over the reader and the system knows how many credits are left in their account. If they have enough credit, the machine will pour a delicious cup of coffee.

The Arduino communicates to an Android phone using the Bluetooth module. [Oliver’s] Android app was built using MIT’s app inventor. It keeps track of the account credits and allows the user to add more. The system can currently keep track of up to forty accounts. [Oliver] also mentions that you can use any Bluetooth terminal program to control the system instead of a smart phone app. Continue reading “Coffee Payment System Doesn’t Void Your Warranty” →

DRM Protection Removed For… Coffee?

December 16, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 75 Comments

Keurig, the manufacturer of a single-serve coffee brewing system, has a very wide following amongst coffee drinkers. Their K-cup (pre-packaged coffee grounds with a coffee filter, all in a plastic container) is an interesting concept and makes brewing a single cup of coffee much more efficient over making a whole pot. Their newer line of coffee makers, the Keurig 2.0, has some interesting (and annoying) security features though, which [Kate Gray] has found an interesting and simple way around.

The DRM security in these coffee makers is intended to keep third-party “cups” from being used in the Keurig. It can recognize an authentic Keurig cup, and can stop the operation of the coffee pot if a knockoff is placed in the machine. We can only assume that this is because Keurig makes a heap of cash by selling its canisters of coffee. One simple solution was already covered a few days ago by taping an authentic lid to the machine. This one doesn’t require any authentic pods but just removes one wire from a wiring harness inside of the case.

There are other ways around the security on these devices, but when [Kate Gray] actually investigated, she found the security decidedly lacking. With something this simple, one can only speculate how much Keurig has really invested in making sure users don’t use third-party cups of coffee in their machines, but it also brings up the classic question of who really owns hardware if we can’t use it in the way we want, rather than the way the manufacturer wants.

You can read more about the project on its Reddit page. Thanks to [MyOwnDemon] for the tip!

Delta Coffee-Brewing Bot

October 9, 2014 by Ethan Zonca 8 Comments

Pour-over coffee brewing is a simple and cheap hands-on alternative to using an automatic coffee maker. Although coffee aficionados often choose pour-over just for the manual brewing experience, this didn’t stop [Elias] from automating his pour-over coffee setup with an elaborate delta-robot: the DeBrew.

The coffee-brewing robot is built around a delta assembly from a 3d printer controlled by a BeagleBone Black. The BeagleBone drives stepper motors, displays information on a small open-source hardware HDMI LCD display, and serves up a web interface to control the machine. The radius of the pouring pattern, water temperature, and grind coarseness of the DeBrew can all be customized though its web interface.

For those who want to build their own pour-over robot, [Elias] has made a SketchUp drawing of the design and all of his Python source code available as open-source. Check out the video after the break where [Elias] explains how his delta pour-over bot works.

Continue reading “Delta Coffee-Brewing Bot” →

Retrotechtacular: Time For Coffee

September 3, 2014 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

If you ask us, it’s almost always a good time for coffee. In the spotlight this week is an educational/promotional film made by A&P, who started in the 1800s as with a chain of shops offering coffee and tea. By the 1950s, they were operating full self-serve grocery stores with a trail of shuttered mom and pop operations in their wake.

This is the story of coffee as it goes from the nursery to the field to the shelves of your local A&P. It covers the growing, cultivation, and distribution of coffee from South American crops that at the time covered more than one million square miles of Brazil alone.

Coffee trees leave the nursery at two years old and are planted in nutrient-rich red soil. Two to three years later, they bear their first crop. Coffee blossoms appear first, and the fruit ripens over the next 8-9 months. Skilled workers pick the berries by hand. We are told that the average tree produces one pound of roasted coffee per year.

The day’s harvest is collected, weighed, and bagged for further production. The fruits are crushed to remove each bean from its red jacket. Then, the beans are washed and spread out in the sun for 8-10 days. They are frequently rotated so they dry evenly. The dried coffee is packed in bags and sent into the city.

At a warehouse, the coffee is inspected, sorted, and graded. Bags are stamped with the coffee’s country of origin and intended destination before going to the seaport. A very important step happens here. As each bag walks by on the shoulders of a worker, another guy stabs it to get a sample of the beans. The on-site A&P officials take over at this point and do their own inspections, sending samples to the US. Here, the coffees are roasted and taste tested for both strength and flavor from a giant lazy Susan full of porcelain cups.

The film takes a brief detour to tell us that the great cities of Latin America were built upon the labors of coffee exportation. We see a montage of vistas, skylines, and shorelines, which bring it back to the subject of shipping the coffee to various ports of call. At the dock, bags are tumbled onto large nets to be loaded on the ship. As coffee is susceptible to moisture, special care is taken to avoid the ill effects of traveling out of the tropics.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Time For Coffee” →