This Coffee Machine Features a Whopping Two Axes

That boring old $15 drip coffee maker you have in the cupboard is actually pretty darn good — it turns out that we solved the whole coffee thing a long time ago. But coffee enthusiasts are constantly looking for new ways to reinvent the wheel and show off their superior tastes, so pour-over coffee is now the hot thing. Because that’s a pain to make, zeroshot built this two-axis literal coffee machine to do the work.

Pour-over coffee is exactly what it sounds like: coffee made by pouring hot water over coffee in a filter and directly into a cup. If that sounds an awful lot like drip coffee to you, then you just don’t get it, man.

To automate that, zeroshot had to build a machine capable of doing three different tasks: grinding coffee beans and depositing them, boiling water, and dispensing the hot water evenly over the fresh coffee grounds.

Zeroshot achieved that by building a small machine that is a bit like a 3D printer with only two linear axes. Or maybe a pen plotter on stilts would be a better comparison. It operates under the control of an Arduino, which coordinates five different motors: two steppers for the linear axes, one stepper for the bean grinder strapped to the carriage, one servo, and one pump.

The servo and pump are for the water. That boils in an electric kettle and the Arduino starts it by pushing its button with the servo. It then dispenses the water using the pump, with the output tube attached to the carriage.

To get that all working, zeroshot just had to whip up some code to coordinate the movement. Rather than using G-code with an existing interpreter, he wrote his own functions for the kinematics. The highlight is the spiral movement when dispensing water, which ensures that the coffee grounds all get nicely saturated.

I’m still not convinced this makes a cup o’ joe any better than a Mr. Coffee from the thrift store, but it sure is a lot more fun to watch and should impress any coffee snobs in the vicinity.