Having a shared coffee maker in the workplace is both a blessing and a curse. It’s nice to have constant access to coffee, but it can be frustrating to find the coffee pot emptied right as you walk in to the break room. To solve this problem in their office, [Vitort] and co. built an IOT solution that notifies everyone of the current coffee status on a Slack channel.

This project wasn’t built just as a convenience for the office, either. It makes extensive use of AWS SNS, the simple notification system from Amazon Web Services because they wanted to learn to use this technology specifically. Besides the notification system, the device itself is based on a NodeMCU/ESP8266, communicating over WiFi, and is a simple push-button design which coffee drinkers push when a fresh pot is made, and then push again when the coffee is empty.

While relatively straightforward, this project is a good one to look at if you’ve been interested in AWS at all, especially the simple notification system. It’s a pretty versatile tool, and all of the code used in the project is available on the project page for your reading pleasure. If you’re more interested in the coffee aspect of this project, we have a special coffee maker for you too.