Latte Less | Devpost

Start your coffee machine remotely! (but responsibly)
Join us....
Visualize your caffeine consumption!
Really works!

Inspiration

Do you ever feel like you ingest too much caffeine? Spend too much money on coffee? What if you could hold yourself accountable by viewing the total amount of coffee drank and money spent? Better, what if you could physically limit yourself to a reasonable level of intake, by enabling your coffee machine at certain hours only?

What it does

The app tracks how much coffee you're drinking, and only lets you start your coffee maker when you're below your limit, as well as the time being early enough in the day. Your dashboard also shows you how much coffee you've been drinking, and the cost associated with it. It tracks coffee from sources outside your coffee maker by sending a push notification once per day, letting you quickly input the number of cups of coffee you had outside your home, and reminding you to check the dashboard.

How we built it

We used react-native with expo to create a mobile app, which communicates with a web server running on node.js. The web server sends a command to the arduino to power the servo, switching on your coffee maker. To store user data, the app communicates directly with Firestore.

Challenges we ran into

This was both of our first times doing any hardware, so there were some challenges there. We wanted to use an esp32 instead of the arduino, so that the web server could be independent of a laptop. However, when I plugged in the chip it started melting, so we abandoned that idea.

Getting the stepper motor to run for the first time took a frustratingly long time, eventually we realized there's a tiny switch on the driver board that was the wrong way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have built a functional app that (mostly) does what we want, and connects to working hardware, especially since there were only two of us.

What we learned

Lots about hardware, especially to bring a usbc adapter if your laptop doesn't have any usb ports. A better understanding of networking between the various wired and wireless components.

What's next for Latte Less

Going from a prototype button presser to a fully enclosed and mounted cage around the coffee maker's start button, making it infeasible or simply too annoying to make coffee when you shouldn't be.