Secrets of a Coffee Machine

I was sitting in the kitchen area at work, during lunch, typing away my previous blog entry, sipping coffee and watching the people pass by and lo and behold I see 2 guys open up the coffee machine and mess with it. They were replacing the labels on the different types of the coffee that it could serve. Now there are lot more options.

I need more coffee, tea bags and water doesn't do it. So I walk up to the coffee machine to see what it looks like inside of a 5.5 ft tall coffee machine. Alright nothing fancy really, no blinking lights and stuff, just regular plastic holders of different powders. So I ask the guy if he could give me how the machine worked.

The guy is all animated now and launches into an explanation. So this machine has several holders. IT has a holders for

• Coffee beans
• Chocolate powder
• Cream made from veges imported from Netherlands (eh? fancy that)
• Vanilla

So the there is a boiler and a piston. When some one gets coffee, the piston pushes the hot water through the freshly grounded coffee causing it have a right mixture of 4oz and it can't do more than that. Apparently in European that is the standard for amount of grounded coffee. He goes on to with disdain that here in the US, people are just used to drippy drippy coffee and lots of it. That made me laugh, seeing his expression, the expression of disdain and pain as if something precious was desecrated!

LMAO! He goes I have trouble with customers, they want 24 oz of coffee, which means regular 4oz of coffee with lots of water. Our machine serves only 8oz. He goes on to rant that the difference between macchiato and regular coffee is the amount of water and of course the preparation style! Ha ha ha ha, yeah buddy laugh away at the difference of amount of water but the preparation style matters :p.

Talk to my Italian friend C about pizza and he will rant the same way :p, you cannot get him to eat dominos pizza! I digress,

So the machine has seperate preparation chambers for hot choc with the creamer, that doesnt mix with vanilla, to give it a better taste and not some lingering taste of vanilla. He then goes on to talk about Starbucks was instrumental in introducing the whole measured way of preparing expresso than the large coffee pot style. That's interesting.

I ask him so what kind of controllers does this vending system use and if there was a SDK available for us with mess with. He laughed, yeah I can connect the coffee machine to the internet or to the phone jack. Now imagine that, before you leave your desk you tell the machine what coffee you want and lo and behold it is ready when you get there! And he goes, I won't be too happy if you guys messed with it. Aww come on what can us innocent engineers do :D We are totally harmless ;)

The coffee machine apparently uses MDB protocol to communicate to a software that runs on windows system (Yuck)! You can hunt for MDB/ICP protocol for details and see this video for open source coffee machine. Well he was done with changing of coffee machine and was on the way out. I couldn't help but laugh at his rants, funny as hell