The Daily Grind Just Got Smarter
You'll never run out of coffee again with this DIY smart scale that auto-orders beans before you’re out to avoid a caffeine crisis.
Is the idea of going without your morning cup of coffee enough to keep you up at night? Do you wake up in a cold sweat wondering if you remembered to set your coffee maker to auto-start in the morning? When you grab your bag of coffee beans, do you have a fear that when you go to scoop some out none will be found? If so, you may have some problems that electronics cannot help you with. But that is not going to stop makers from trying to solve these problems anyway.
GitHub user Rukenshia has been hard at work on a project aimed at making sure coffee lovers never have to go without their cup of joe. The device takes the form of a smart scale, and its primary application is in continuously weighing a bag of coffee. When the weight of the bag falls below some predefined threshold, it is capable of automatically ordering another bag and averting a caffeine crisis.
The smart scale has a 3D-printed case with a slick and modern look. A one-kilogram load cell at the top is designed for setting a bag of coffee beans on. An ESP32 NodeMCU Module WLAN WiFi Development Board handles the collection of sensor measurements, general processing tasks, and interacting with the terminal.shop API to order more coffee, as appropriate. A 2-inch LCD display module with 240x320-pixel resolution and a button round out the user interface, and a WS2812 LED strip was thrown in to add some cool lighting effects underneath the scale.
Aside from tracking how much coffee remains, the device can also be switched into a Barista mode. In this mode, the scale can be used for precise measurements of ingredients to get a perfect cup of coffee without triggering an order being placed. But if you do need something, there is also a Store mode that lets you view your past orders or browse new products.
If it seems like this has all been tried before, well, it sort of has. Amazon Dash, for example, allowed people to order items that they were running low on with a single push of a button. That never really took off, and the Dash buttons are now a defunct product that is only used by hardware hackers that want to repurpose them. Dash did not fare any better than the idea of ordering products via smart speakers, which was also supposed to be a source of revenue for big retail and big tech, but that turned out to be a flop with consumers as well.
So most people may not want to place orders with a button push. That means we are not likely to see any more commercial rollouts of similar products any time soon. But if you are the sort that considers this a convenience — and you are very serious about coffee — then maybe this smart scale is right up your alley. Rukenshia has made all of the details necessary to reproduce the project public, so go get ‘em and get busy. A nice tall cup of joe might help — you haven’t run out, have you?
