Building an IoT coffee maker with realtime capacity monitoring

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Now you can see how much coffee is left in the pot without leaving your chair. 

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You’ve all been in the situation before: You arrive at the office coffee maker in the morning only to find that it’s empty. If only you could curb that disappointment with realtime reporting on exactly how much coffee is left in the pot. Well fortunately for you, PubNub has harnessed the power of the ATmega328P MCU and the PubNub Data Stream Network to build the IoT Coffee Maker with realtime coffee capacity monitoring. The project works by collecting coffee volume levels and then streams the data in realtime to a live-updating UI.

In the video below, the coffee maker’s creator Kurt Clothier introduces his project, walks through some of the steps to build it, and shows it in action. If you want to get to creating one for yourself or your workplace, be sure to check out the entire IoT coffee pot tutorial and live demo on PubNub.

In a nutshell, the Atmel IoT coffee pot gathers volume data based on the weight of the coffee pot using a scale. The ATmega328P MCU is the brains behind the operation, while an ESP8266 is used for Internet connection. The volume data is then sent to a realtime web UI and visualized in realtime via PubNub Pub/Sub Messaging and the EON JavaScript framework.

The project requires the following:

• Digital Kitchen Scale: Any kind with an LCD screen should work.
• Microcontroller with I/O and Wi-Fi: ESP8266 in combination with an ATmega328P MCU.
• PubNub: PubNub Pub/Sub messaging to stream data between our scale and the web UI.
• Source Code and Schematics: All the source code and schematics are open source and available in PubNub’s full tutorial and code walkthrough.

Web UI updates the % of coffee left in realtime.

Obviously, this tutorial can be expanded outside the kitchen to a broad number of powerful IoT use cases. With this same design, you can track readings from any number of sensors, and stream its data in realtime to any number of subscribers in realtime. Thinking big, you can implement similar technology in large scale industrial IoT settings, like agriculture, oil or medical.

You can even get rid of the scale altogether and use these concepts to collect data from anything with a segmented LCD screen. With that said, Clothier and the PubNub team would love to see what you come up with, so be sure to let them know about your awesome project! But for now, let’s enjoy the fact that we know exactly what percentage of the coffee pot is full.