Smart Coffee Machine - How we started

[WouterLemaire]

This blog is the last part of the following blog series about the Smart Coffee Machine, here you have an overview:

Smart Coffee Machine Overview

How we started building a Smart Coffee Machine (current blog)

From Sensor to the Cloud including the installation of the IoT Edge Gateway

SAP IoT Service Cockpit config and Edge Processing

SAP IoT Thing Modeler with a custom IoT UI5 app on top

Integration with SAP backend

 

Before we start explaining all the technical details of our Flexso Smart Coffee Machine, I want to tell you how we started. The first blog is part of a showcase and it isn’t the best place to tell how we started. As you may have read, it all started during a hackathon. In this hackathon, we didn’t start with the waterflow sensor. Our first idea was to control the coffee machine instead of reading data from it. Therefor we tried to control a Senseo by using a UI5 app.

During the hackathon, we opened a Senseo Coffee machine and tried to connect a Raspberry PI to the buttons of the Senseo. We were able to control the On/Off button via python on the Raspberry PI!

On this picture you see how we connected the Raspberry PI to the On/Off button. You also see Dries who is looking a bit afraid that the Senseo would explode.



With a Senseo, you also need to push a second button to get the coffee eventually. To do so, we connected the second button to the Raspberry PI. On the next picture you see Augusto, who is part of our sales team at Flexso, connecting the second button.



Easy said, easy done, two buttons connected and ready for a second test. Maybe Dries was right… during the second test, the Senseo exploded literally



No more Senseo for us… and the end of the hackathon for us… But not the end of the Smart Coffee Machine story. We started thinking bigger and thought of solution which could be used for all types of coffee machines and not only a Senseo. We also wanted a more safer solutions and decided to keep it simple and only read the data from the Coffee Machine. That’s why we came up with the idea of using a Waterflow sensor: