unexpected coffee

a dive into industrial coffee machines

Clemens Hopfer and Hetti

Playlists: 'camp2023' videos starting here / audio

Last year, an industrial coffee vending machine with broken power electronics arrived at Metalab. This is a talk about how we repaired the machine, how these machines usually work, a dive into legacy software and electronics setups, and why those coffee vending machines taste like they do.

A bit more than a year ago, in early summer of 2022, someone contacted us at the Metalab Hackspace if we would be interested in an electronically defective, but probably repairable industrial coffee vending machine.
An industrial coffee machine with a touchscreen and cocoa toppings? No idea where we would find enough room for it or if it would actually be used, but of course we'd be interested! Even if we couldn't repair the original electronics it would still serve as a good base to build a cocktail bot for Roboexotica, the festival for Cocktailrobotics. So roughly a month later the machine arrived at Metalab.
After a few months of collecting (additional) dust and annoying a few members, we started the quest to get this machine back to work and to explore the (questionable) world of industrial coffee vending legacy, from hardware, over electronics to software architecture. There is also the final question: does it run Doom?

We will talk about:
- how these machines typically work mechanically
- why industrial/office coffee vending machines taste like they do
- what specifically failed in the electronics for this machine and how to debug this
- and a few insights in the electronics and software setup of this vendor.
- why RFC2324 might need an extension for soup

If everything goes well we'll bring the machine to camp and probably to the talk.

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