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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
He should definitely put that into the wikipedia.
I wish that worked on girlfriends...
This would be great for taking soups along with you. Especially for lunchs or breakfasts, or on hiking trips.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Hot coffee hack? Wait till the ESRB hears about this!
Why did this take so long to figure out? MRE's have been self-heating for a long time and the heater in them gets really hot in less time...
But why would anyone buy Wolfgang Puck's coffee, which I've never heard him associated with? It's like the idea of buying Lil' Caesar tea... why would I?
Okay, maybe it is neat that they've been able to make this work, but doesn't it seem just a bit wasteful to anyone but me? Western society at it's best, I guess.
robert
After the article earlier about the GTA hack, /.ers will all be much more interested in hot coffee than before.
Would have been interesting if they made seperate compartments or something to allow for reheating later. And on a seperate note, what the hell did they spend $24 million on? The chemical compound? Beyond that everything else seems to be simple and already existing technology.
The army has been using this technology in its rations for a loooong time now.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
The article notes that the container, while appearing very large, actually holds less coffee than one would originally think. Even after the author removed the insulation, there was still little room for the coffee itself.
Also, because it uses a water / calcium oxide reaction (basic high school chemistry stuff), which means that it'll heat once and then become nothing more than another cup. While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
-- arstchnca
--
It's a great idea however the amount of coffee you actually get to drink compared to the mechanism that makes the whole thing work is quite a small amount (i.e like the size of a short macchiato).
25 Million and 10 years? That's like employing 15 scientists and engineers at a good wage (plus room for admin overhead), all working 40 hour weeks for an entire decade.
For this low-tech device? Something doesn't add up.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Pulling it apart is probably the best thing you could do with it.
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it. A shot of espresso made with freshly roasted / ground beans and on a well maintained machine by a well trained barrista is the apex of coffee perfection and cannot be improved upon. There is no substitute, and it cannot be put in an can.
Why the hell such abominations as the Wolfgang Puck Gourmet Latte and just about everything they serve at Starbacks are permitted to exist is beyond me.
:wq
Let's just plug the MAKE blog's rss feed into Slashdot directly!
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Lots of pictures... try this Coral cache
-Code
I bet you'll start seeing obnoxious pple going through all of a store's stock pushing the heat button on each of the cans so that the end customer gets cold coffee :p
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Anyone know how much one of these things cost? Do is it even taste good? I cant imagine it would be any better than any other instant coffee.
It's been mentioned time and time again that Google does not cache images. If you want a backup, use the coral cache or Mirrordot
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.
[/rant]
t ml
The hack is cool.
But this crappy coffee can is worthy of a patent? A calcium oxide/water reaction learned in any highschool advanced chemistry class?
Reading the patent below, I must wonder if those who give out patents get lost in the gobbely-gook of the descriptions not to see that it seems to fail the basic requirements of a patent:
http://www.patentsearchexpress.com/requirements.h
Especially in the view of non-obviousness in view of prior art. Self-heating pads using assorted chemicals have been around for a long time. How long was it before someone applied it to not to hands but to food/drinks which we've been warming up since like forever. This is question of application, not innovation.
I also have to question the $24 million to develop this thing. Reminds me when GE (or maybe whirlpool???) came out with front-loading washers like 10 years or so ago and announced it took $100M to develop and spouting all the benefits of the system (lower water consumption, etcetera). When the europeans have been using front-loaders since at least the '50s, you gotta wonder who's been embezzling all that cash.
[/rant]
(From The article}
United States Patent 5,461,867
Scudder , et al. October 31, 1995
Container with integral module for heating or cooling the contents
Abstract
An outer container for holding a material, such as a food, beverage or medicine with a sealed thermic module inside the container. The thermic module contains chemical reactants that mix upon actuation of the container by a user. Mixing of the reactants produces an exothermic or endothermic chemical reaction, depending upon the reactants selected. The contents of the outer container surround a portion of the outside surface of the thermic module, thereby facilitating conduction of heat. The thermic module has a hollow module body that is closed at one end and a module cap that seals the other end of the module body. The module body contains the solid reactant, and the module cap contains the liquid reactant. The module cap has a tubular section with a flexible member closing one end and a breakable barrier closing the other end. With the exception of the barrier, the cap is of unitary construction. The cap has one or more integrally formed prongs extending from the inner surface of the disc toward the barrier. The prongs move in an axial direction toward the barrier and may also spread apart radially when the outer surface of the flexible member or an actuator connected to it is depressed by the user's finger. The dual motion of the prongs in both axial and radial directions promotes complete puncturing of the barrier and thus fast mixing of the reactants.
Link.
Just make sure it doesn't heat up to 145 degrees on you.
The military has been doing this for YEARS.
MRE heaters.. No big deal. You can buy them by the crateloads at gun shows for 50 cents each, will heat a meal in a few minutes, just add water. Stores forever.
Must have items if you live on the coast where you may lose power from hurricanes, etc..
(one of MANY places to get the things..)
http://militarysurplusdepot.com/m_r_e_heater.html
I can't believe that noone has made the obligatory joke about the old woman who spills the Wolfgang Puck coffee on herself and then sues him for millions.
Followed by the debunking replies who will supply the link to snopes.
Followed by the bashing of lawyers.
Then someone will blame it on MS/USPTO/RIAA/SCO.
By then it will have thankfully dropped to the bottom of the page and then into old news.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Finally I can get a hot cup of coffee anywhere I go, because, you know, it's not like there's a place to buy coffee on every corner.
Oh wait, Starbucks...
...and a million other convenience stores, restaurants, cafes and coffeeshops.
but are cheap to create, use little raw materiel, have a small waste footprint, and their production and use are in the public interest (epidemiologically speaking).
Antimatter would do a great job heating it up, but at the loss of a portion of the coffee, which would be annihilated. I hate seeing good coffee wasted, even on such an efficient process as total conversion of matter to energy.
Fitting a magnetic bottle and cyclotron into a small portable coffeecup is also somewhat of a dilemma.
According to USA Today, the retail price is around $2.25.
-c
Off topic, but...
The energy in a matter-antimatter (proton anti-proton) reaction goes toward the production of various particles that are of sufficiently high energy to pass right through your coffee: muons, gamma rays. Neutrinos too, which don't interact.
Under the unrealistic assumption that all the energy produced goes toward heating the coffee:
2ng matter + 2ng antimatter = 4e-9 g
E = m*c^2
= 4e-9 g * (3e8 m/s)^2
= 3.6e8 g*m^2/s^2
A joule is kg*m^2/s^2, so we're looking at 3.6e5 J of energy. Approximating coffee with water, water has a heat capacity of 4186 J/(kg*K), and assuming we have 100 cm^3 of it:
3.6e5 J / 4186 J/(kg*K) / 0.1 kg = 8600 K
I hope you like your coffee vaporized.
I subscribe to Consumer Reports, which has reviewed them in the 08/05 issue. They apparently go for $9 per four pack. Not TOO much more than current cold coffee drinks, but I think those are more than 10oz, right? I know I usually drink a 16 in the morning.
A catch, they said, is that you have to store them at room temperature. On a cold day, apparently, they won't get as hot (108 was all that they could get after putting it in the fridge).
I realize this is offtopic and will risk getting modded down, but why are you duping my post word for word an hour later? Is this karma theft instead of karma whoring? It actually seems to work because you got modded up and I got modded down "redundant."
I assume that you just wait for a higher rated post to scroll off the first page and then repost at the top. I am curious on why you'd even bother though. Are you just trying to game the mods and see if they're paying attention? It seems like an odd hobby.
I've tried these. They are not too great tasting, but handy. However I dragged some along on a camping trip in Colorado, thinking how great it would be to have hot coffee first thing in the morning. Well they don't seem to work at 9,000 feet above sea level. It was also about 60(f) degrees out. Didn't even get warm. Buzz kill - literally. They heat up OK in Denver - 5,000 feet - starting from room temperature. There is no warning about altitude issues on the containers that I could find, so maybe it was the starting temperature, but if it reaches 140 degrees from 70, I would think it would still become reasonably warm from 60.
Be warned that the previos poster's opinion is wrong and he's not entitled to it. The PDF isn't related and the other blogger isn't better.
We don't have those fancy things in Canada as far as I know but I wouldn't buy em if we did. First of all it looks like you don't get very much coffee and second it looks expensive and third you're allways in driving distance of a Tim Hortons anyways.
How often are you so far from a power source that you can't spend $10 and get a small coffee cup sized hotplate?
Silly silly silly
On the other hand if you could somehow drain the coffee and put a heat activated smoke bomb or something in there than they'd sell
While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
Yeah, pretty much. A 4 pack sells for about $6. I found these in a grocery store a couple months back and picked up a 4 pack for the "oooh shiny" factor. The coffee was only so-so, of course, but it did deliver as promised. Coffee got properly hot.
I too was struck by the weight and heft of the thing. I felt that it's be useful for camping trips because, if necessary, you could beat a puma to death with the damn thing. Way, way overbuilt. Very solid feel to it.
I have not purchased them again, and likely will not except for possible camping purposes. The real question, for me, is where would one need this sort of device? At home, you have a microwave if you need to heat up a plastic tube of premade coffee, so the self-heating is redundant. Most workplaces have coffee makers for the employees which tend to be always full. In the car on the way to work, you could stop by a coffee house or fast foodery or something. It would be handy for being out in the wild, far from power and easily obtained coffee, but how often does that occur? People who go camping usually only go maybe once a year, and usually they are in RVs nowadays, with power and coffee making devices.
It's basically a product without a large market.
If the thing held soup, now, you'd have something. Lots of office worker types would likely keep several in their desks. Because while many offices have microwaves, and microwavable soups already exist, not having to get up to have some soup has an odd attraction to it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
jesus, not hot coffee, anything but hot coffee.
What do you expect? Just don't put it on your nuts and you'll be fine.
This "new" thing is in the First World War was used by the English army to warming up their canned food.
Most of the money went to research legal defences in case someone ignites one of these in their lap then sues.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This happened to me twice. That's why I don't post anything meaningful anymore if I post at all.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.