Wake Up to Freshly Brewed Coffee!

Depending on your dependence on coffee to get started in the morning, you may have a hard time getting anything done before imbibing this magical drink. If this sounds like you, then having a hot coffee brewed automatically in the morning would get things started nicely.

After seeing a Kickstarter campaign for a machine called the Barisieur that is able to do just that, Fabien Chouteau decided that he could make something similar with a normal espresso maker. After obtaining the sacrificial device, he set set off to make it happen. His solution was to trigger the button circuit with an STM32F469 DISCO board, which importantly, includes a touchscreen for easy control.

As seen in this video, he’s able to set it to brew in the morning with just a few taps of the display. As an important bonus, brewing not only produces a tasty beverage, but an annoying sound to wake you up!

Interestingly, the control circuit runs at 16V, so instead of triggering it directly with his microprocessor, he used a MOSFET to allow indirect control of the machine signals. You can see the hacking process in the video below, including triggering it with a breadboard around 3:15. Code for the project is on GitHub, but as Chouteau notes, you shouldn’t mess around with household appliances unless you really know what you’re doing!