(no subject)
OK, so I've been working on an idea, and besides trivial things like "overpriced" and "overcomplicated" I think I'm making quite good progress on the idea.
So at work there is a coffee maker and sometimes people make coffee in the afternoon. On several occasions there was coffee made that went to waste because the person making it didn't inform others of the presence of fresh coffee.
Thinking of a technical solution for this resulted in my idea for a "late pot button" that people could press and it would post to twitter that there had been a late pot of coffee brewed. Pushing a button is much easier than walking down a few halls and telling people.
At this point I decided it would be an interesting project, so I've been working on that concept.
I've decided to use an Arduino for the brains of the device. An arduino is simply a tiny little computer that can do some things and is easy to write programs for. The one I got was from AsyncLabs and supports wireless connections, which I thought would be quite useful for porting to twitter.
Since the initial idea of the button, though, there have been a few modifications that have slowed this down. There would certainly be times where people would make coffee and not push the button. There would also likely be times where people saw a button and pressed it because it is a button. Button-avoidance would be great.
So, I came up with the idea of measuring the temperature -- if the coffee maker got hot it would signal that coffee had just been made.
My dad had an even better idea -- go based off of weight.
I've currently scrapped the idea of posting to twitter and will probably just have it serving a local web page that tells you about how many cups are left. When this number goes up (allowing for coffee-pouring, of course), then it is likely that someone has started to make a pot of coffee. In addition to the webpage, alerts should be sent to interested parties. I'm also thinking that it would be very possible to create graphs of available coffee levels.
So currently I have my Arduino and just need a pressure sensor, a spring, and some housing for the thing (which the coffee maker will likely sit upon).
Is it worth it? Welllllll... it's an interesting project, but I don't think people are going to be pounding down my door for one... interesting learning experience, though.
Downsides:
cost: this will totally never pay for itself -- the project is going to cost more than the cost of lots of wasted coffee
wireless: wireless config on the little device isn't great and has to be (not-easily) reconfigured every time you're going to be connecting to a new wireless network
So at work there is a coffee maker and sometimes people make coffee in the afternoon. On several occasions there was coffee made that went to waste because the person making it didn't inform others of the presence of fresh coffee.
Thinking of a technical solution for this resulted in my idea for a "late pot button" that people could press and it would post to twitter that there had been a late pot of coffee brewed. Pushing a button is much easier than walking down a few halls and telling people.
At this point I decided it would be an interesting project, so I've been working on that concept.
I've decided to use an Arduino for the brains of the device. An arduino is simply a tiny little computer that can do some things and is easy to write programs for. The one I got was from AsyncLabs and supports wireless connections, which I thought would be quite useful for porting to twitter.
Since the initial idea of the button, though, there have been a few modifications that have slowed this down. There would certainly be times where people would make coffee and not push the button. There would also likely be times where people saw a button and pressed it because it is a button. Button-avoidance would be great.
So, I came up with the idea of measuring the temperature -- if the coffee maker got hot it would signal that coffee had just been made.
My dad had an even better idea -- go based off of weight.
I've currently scrapped the idea of posting to twitter and will probably just have it serving a local web page that tells you about how many cups are left. When this number goes up (allowing for coffee-pouring, of course), then it is likely that someone has started to make a pot of coffee. In addition to the webpage, alerts should be sent to interested parties. I'm also thinking that it would be very possible to create graphs of available coffee levels.
So currently I have my Arduino and just need a pressure sensor, a spring, and some housing for the thing (which the coffee maker will likely sit upon).
Is it worth it? Welllllll... it's an interesting project, but I don't think people are going to be pounding down my door for one... interesting learning experience, though.
Downsides:
cost: this will totally never pay for itself -- the project is going to cost more than the cost of lots of wasted coffee
wireless: wireless config on the little device isn't great and has to be (not-easily) reconfigured every time you're going to be connecting to a new wireless network