[Mike] is the only one in his house who drinks coffee, and uses a simple single-serving brewer with no auto-on feature. And since no one really wants to have to stand around making coffee in the morning, [Mike]’s solution was to IoT-ize his electrical socket.

The project consists of a relay board controlled by an ESP8266-packing Adafruit Huzzah. It’s all powered by a 9V power supply with a regulator supplying the relay coil and Huzzah with 5V. [Mike]’s using CloudMQTT to communicate with the outlet.

We often see these automation projects hit a wall when it comes to adding a user-side dashboard. [Mike] is using a free Android app called MQTT Dash which allows for a number of different UI components and even had coffee maker icons already built in. It’s certainly worth a look for your own projects. [Mike] uses it to turn on the outlet for 10 minutes, and by the time he grabs half-and-half the outlet is already off again.

It turns out that connecting coffee pots to the Internet is a driving force among out readers. This one alerts the whole office when the coffee is done, while another one is controlled by Alexa. Then again, sometimes all you can do is reverse engineer the Internet of coffee.