The Best Part of Waking Up Is Coffee in Your PC

For coffee lovers, a morning pot of joe is more than just part of a daily ritual, it is a necessity. The smell of freshly ground beans, the sounds of brewing coffee, and the swirl of go juice in a big mug are the only things standing between getting out of bed and hitting the snooze button just one more time. But the super powers afforded by megadoses of caffeine wane, our capes unceremoniously fall to the floor, and we are once again feeling like Clark Kent by lunchtime.

The creative engineers over at Nerdforge like to meet this afternoon challenge with another cup of happiness, but going through the trouble of grinding beans, changing the filter, and filling the coffee machine with water for a single cup just seems like too much work. So Martina did the most obvious thing possible and built a single-cup coffee machine into a computer to solve this dilemma. I mean, who among us can honestly say that we have not brought a mug to our PC at least three or four times today, only to get a cruel reminder, after looking for a place to pour in the beans, that it still cannot brew a cup of coffee for us a full nine years after Doc Brown powered a time machine with scraps from a trash can?

As always, the goal is to drink coffee, not go through the motions of making it, so Martina wanted to make sure that the PC coffee maker would be fully automated. This involved making tubing that could direct ground beans from a grinder into a coffee maker. With an Arudino and some relays, these devices could be controlled with just a pushbutton, and to make sure that the inside of the computer never gets flooded, an ultrasonic sensor was utilized to prevent the system from starting up unless a mug is in place.

This is a lot of equipment to fit into a PC case, so Martina used the absurdly large Corsair Obsidian Series 1000D Super-Tower Case for the build. The front fan rack was removed to make some extra room, and a hole was drilled in the top of the case for beans to flow in from the cup that sits on top. Always be sure to remember “safety squints” when doing work of this sort (thanks for the reminder, Martina!).

With a handful of 3D-printed parts, a nice automated coffee maker was integrated into the case, but this thing was supposed to do some computing as well, so a system was built around an Intel i7-14700K CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti GPU. Not bad at all for a coffee machine! The appearance of the case was also taken into consideration. Paint stirring sticks, which after being oiled became a beautiful wood paneling, were used to decorate the PC inside and out.

Building a coffee maker that produces lots of heat and steam, and also moves water around, into a PC probably seems like a really bad idea. And it probably is. But Martina did put some large fans in the case to direct airflow from the back of the case to the front where it can exit by the coffee machine, which should help with heat issues, anyway. In any case, the coffee PC is working great for now, so if you are not too worried about the safety of your computer (or yourself), you could also give it a try. But it might be wise to just watch the video and live vicariously on this one.