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Trojan Coffee Room Machine Returns
MKalus writes "It seems that when they turned it off it wasn't quite the end to the machine after all. The german magazine "Der Spiegel" bought it and got it repaired. And now it is online again, not in the Trojan room, but the same machine." You just can't keep a good coffee machine down.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fnetzwelt%2Fnetzkultur%2F0%2C15 18%2C174146%2C00.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&prev= %2Flanguage_tools
The coffee machine was shut down earlier this year, but I guess it's back.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot page which links to the page I listed before. There's also a "biography" of the coffee pot here
I totally remember loading this thing up w/ Mosaic. The shot of it being switched off is about what it looked like then-- tiny and black and white.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
this thing is going to end up in the Smithsonian on display as a proud emblem of the geekiness of the early internet.
:-)
Somehow I find this both amusing and disturbing.
From the translation:
But which one makes with an icon of the Webs?
Throw away? Not possibly!
I love online translators.
For those interested in the background, here is an edited Times article that I
collected when the Coffee Pot closed down:
WEDNESDAY MARCH 07 2001
*First star of the Internet retires*
BY JOANNA BALE
THE world's first Internet star is retiring after ten years in the
spotlight.
The unlikely star is a £40 coffee percolator that made its debut in front
of the camera when computer scientists at Cambridge University became
frustrated at walking down several flights of stairs only to find the pot
empty. They set up a camcorder, pointed it at the pot and wrote a program
to relay the image to their screens upstairs, so they would always know
when it was full.
When the World Wide Web was invented soon afterwards, they put it online as
the world's first webcam. Although it is the Internet equivalent of
watching paint dry, it became cult viewing, with 2.4 million visitors.
But now Cambridge's Trojan Room webcam and its subject are being consigned
to the history books because the university computer department is moving.
Dan Gordon, 33, a research scientist, said: "It will be turned off simply
because there is no more need for it.
"It became very popular because it was up and running when there really
wasn't very much else to look at on the Internet. We've kept it going using
old machines, but it quite often breaks down."
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, the man behind the pot website, said: "I first
rigged it up because we were fed up of traipsing half-way around the
building to find there was no coffee in the pot. At first, the image was
only updated about three times a minute - it is now one frame a second -
but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only
greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.
The comeback of the Trojan Room Coffee Cam
The legendary Krups ProAroma out of the even more legendary "Trojan Room" wrote history as the worldwide first webcam. She didn't get thrown away last August because SPIEGEL ONLINE together with a sponsor bought it from the University. Now she is makingn coffee again.
CAM 1 CAM 2
Ten years she fullfilled her duties, brewing coffee. Hundreds of Students and workers at the computer lab at the University of Cambridge warmed their hands and stomachs with the coffee. Million of Web-Surfers from all over the world watched. The Trojan Room Coffee Machine wrote web history since 1994 as the worldwide first webcam. Then, in the summer of 2001, she was supposed to go offline forever.
The computer lab in Cambridge moved, this was one of the reasons. The coffee, say some of the users, was for quite some time more cult than anything else - another reason. And then, in the spring of 2001, the Krups ProAroma died: An era was obviously coming to an end.But what to do with an icon of the web?
Throw it away? Not possible!
She was put up for the higest bidder and SPIEGEL ONLINE together with the Health company Fresenius as a sponsor bought it for the impressive price of DM 10,452.70: Again the "Trojan Coffee Maker" wrote history - the most expensive broken coffee maker in the world.
But she was destined to brew coffee again, she was supposed to send the steamy pictures back out into the web-world. The employees from the manufacturer Krups knew what to do: Free of charge they were going to repair this classic - even though the gurantee had long expired. So she left the office of SPIEGEL ONLINE as soon as she had come in.
And she came back, repaired, as god as new, but still the old. And so, like you could watch her from 1994 until 2001 in Cambridge you can watch her now again, out of two perspectives. The Trojan-Room-Coffee-Machine brews, blubbers and steams again, almost around the clock. And the people nearby are warming their hands and stomachs with the hot coffee, and out there, some maybe the heart.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
It turns out that sensing the amount of water in the pot is quite difficult. If you use a scale, it has to handle heat, humidity, and steam if you put it under the pot. If you put it under the machine, you will also have plenty of water screwing up measurements because it stays in the filter. I thought about bouncing a laser diode over the surface of the water, but that never materialized. I also tried measuring the capacitance of the coffee between two places (more coffee = more conductive dielectric). That didn't work. Coffee and tea are great conductors.
Finally, I took a plastic ruler, drilled holes in it and hooked wires from a ribbon cable up to it, at a regular spacing. The coffee would short between a pin at a certain height (each pin was attached to an R2 ladder) and the ground pin at the bottom. This actually worked reasonably well! (If you could stand a ruler in your coffee pot!)
Oh, I didn't want to figure out how to write a web hit counter CGI script, so I had the stamp store the number of hits in the stamp's EEPROM! Much easier! I still have the code and the hardware lying around, though the coffee machine is long gone (last attached to a DECstation 5000/260, actually).
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