This Friday we started with our first ‘Project Friday’. About once a month, on a Friday, we’ll lock ourselves away for the afternoon with a couple of beers and a fun project. The project doesn’t need to bring money to table, it needs to bring fun, challenges, knowledge and inspiration to the table.
Our first project is definitely an awesome one; Artificial Intelligence meets Coffee! Douwe Egberts was kind enough to provide us with a full automatic coffee machine, well almost full automatic, you still need to push the button to let the machine know whether you want a normal coffee, a cappuccino, an espresso or whatever grinds your gears. Our objective: create an actual full automatic coffee machine. The goal is to add face recognition to the coffee machine: Stand in front of the machine, the machine recognizes who you are and knows which coffee you want.
We started by prepping a Raspberry Pi and installing OpenCV. Dismantling the machine and figuring out how circuit board works using the well proven method of trial and error. Since we’re not engineers, the biggest challenge is probably going to be to hack the coffee machine: within 15 minutes, one colleague managed to short circuit the Arduino board. Great start!
Read more about what happened next
