How we built Coffee ordering machine with Android Things

Every member of coworking has access to the fresh coffee. The problem is that there is no classic espresso machine, but drip coffee machine for making a pot of coffee at a time. Making a coffee is a work for coworking staff, however they should know when the coffee is needed. Sure, there is an option to talk to staff in person or write the message “coffee is gone” to our Slack. NO, these are not right solutions in the era of smart home and smart offices.

We SHOULD make coffee ordering machine based on Android Things with use of Android Things kit I mentioned earlier.

After many iterations because of lack of free time we’ve built coffee kiosk, which is available for use by the members in Vault 42. The fact I love on Android Things platform is that all you need is experience with building apps for Android. When you connect Android Things board to your PC, it behave as a standard smartphone or tablet.

We’ve build the app with Kotlin and Firebase database as a storage for the simple true/false value whether coffee is ready or gone. We’re storing value server-side, because we are building action with Actions on Google to ability of changing state of the coffee by voice. Of course, we want to synchronize coffee state on the both smart display and voice action.

The main screen of the app is showing coffee state altogether with GIFs carefully selected by our creative members in Vault 42. There are only two buttons, one for selecting new coffee state, second for selecting “Coffee gone” state directly. After selecting state and confirm selection on a confirmation screen, new state is saved to Firebase, new GIF is displayed and message is send to our internal Slack immediately hoping the staff will read the message and make the new coffee ASAP :)

We have many plans to improve the app, for example taking photos of sad members before the coffee is requested and sending them to Slack. Ideally with integrating TensorFlow machine learning for detecting sadness in their faces. Hopefully we’ll find some time and energy to make that.

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