Fill 'Er Up
An Improved Automatic Single Use Pod Coffee Maker.
Problem Statement
Coffee is everywhere; 73% of Americans drink it every day, and out of those people, 2 out of 3 choose to make it at home. To make their coffee, most people turn to their single-serve coffee machines in the morning for their convenience and speed, but here’s the thing, these machines are inherently flawed. Sure they offer three, maybe four sizes to choose from, but all of these sizes usually fall in the 8 to 12 oz range, a far cry from the two, or even three cups of coffee the average American drinks daily. With travel mugs and thermoses rising in popularity, 16, 24, and even 32 oz containers have become the norm. Since no single-serve coffee maker can suitably fill these travel containers, coffee drinkers are faced with a dilemma: either underfill their travel mugs with a single brew cycle, or brew multiple cycles and risk overfilling their mug. It is clear that the current coffee maker market fails to meet the needs of its customers.
Project Overview
We intend to create a product that recognizes this need by developing a system that fills up your cup of coffee to your desired height every time. For this project, we envisioned ourselves as a team of engineers working for a single use coffee maker company, who are pitching a new product to company executives. We took an existing Keurig system and modified it using custom PCBs and software to automatically fill the cup to a desired height. In this way, we are able to prove that this kind of system is possible with current coffee makers. In the end, we were able to create a modified Keurig machine that senses the cup height when you put a cup underneath it, tracks the height of the liquid in the cup, and automatically turns off when it determines that your cup is full.
Sources
Final Product
