Latte Maker Project

The Problem

The goal of this project was to automate a coffee-making process. This involved taking orders, making coffee, and delivering it to the customer with minimal customer involvement, requiring only order placement.

Constraints:

• Hot glue and tape are strictly prohibited
• Must use software/hardware from every previous project
• The budget is $500
• It is a class project, so everyone should be involved to a certain extent

The Process

Overall Design Process

The class was divided into 4 teams that worked together to complete the project:

• Transportation: Responsible for transporting the cup
• Coffee Station: Prepares the coffee
• Milk: Froths the milk
• Art Station: Creates latte art

I was part of the transportation team, tasked with moving the coffee cup from station to station.

Transportation Team

The transportation team tackled the following challenges:

• Transport the cup
• Dispense the cup
• User order integration

We further divided into smaller teams to address each of these challenges.

My Contributions

My initial tasks included:

• Creating a website for user orders
• Adding user inputs such as size, latte art, and name
• Updating these values onto the project Airtable
• Creating an Airtable that the entire class could use and modify

All these tasks were completed, but due to differences in ideologies and implementation ideas, the website was ultimately not used.

Afterward, I assisted with the integration of Airtable into the coffee cup dispenser. This involved retrieving values from Airtable to allow the cups to be dispensed and then updating Airtable to signal the next group to start their tasks.

The Solution

The following video demonstrates how the groups collaborated to create an automated coffee shop: