Use Alexa to Turn On Your Coffee Machine with a Voice Command

Steve P owns a DeLonghi Magnifica, which is a high-end coffee machine that makes a brew tasty enough to satisfy even the most discerning of us coffee snobs. It’s a bean-to-cup model, which means you feed it whole coffee beans and it handles all of the grinding and brewing itself. Unfortunately, it also needs to clean itself when it’s powered on, which increases the time it takes to get a steaming mug of coffee after waking up in the morning.

Inspired by the iKettle that his girlfriend uses to make tea, Steve decided it would be best to add Alexa voice control so he could have the DeLonghi going through its cleaning cycle before he even gets out of bed. As many projects have shown, integrating Alexa voice commands through an Echo is a pretty simple job if all you need to do is switch the power with a relay. But, accidentally sending two signals would switch the Magnifica right back off—and trigger an additional time-consuming cleaning cycle.

To eliminate that possibility, Steve’s solution reads the machine’s current power state and only turns the power on if the DeLonghi is currently off. That’s all done with a Particle Photon by monitoring the Magnifica’s status LEDs to determine what it’s currently doing. If it’s off, the Photon is able to switch it on and the cleaning cycle will start. Using a simple Alexa Smart Home Skill API voice command, Steve can turn on the coffee machine when he’s still in bed and have it ready to brew by the time he gets to the kitchen with his coffee mug.