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The Javabot Combines Engineering and Coffee
WormholeFiend writes "The Javabot is the coffee machine of the future — completely next generation. It is the fully-automated system that runs the Roasting Plant Coffee Company in New York and its design is illustrative of what can be achieved using new thinking and methodologies to something that was previously regarded as a black art. The system is part of the experience because the coffee system runs throughout the shop. It's the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine. Customers can choose from any blend of seven different beans and every aspect of the process is controlled."
...does it run java?
Does it look like this one?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
a machine that drinks coffee, and we can take people out of the equation altogether!
And it's written in Perl, right?
Full color illustration here!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Can they make this into a cubicle version?
Picture a new aspect of configuring your office's network being that you have to lay out tubing for all of the cubicle coffee dispensers...
It says that they do not roast on demand because the beans need time to "cool and out-gas". I haven't done my own roasting before, so I was wondering how necessary that really is. If it's just dangerous gases to worry about (??), why not use suction to draw them away? Is there a way to speed up the cooling process, assuming it's really necessary?
Anyone know?
I love coffee.
-l
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... and already slashdotted. Whoda thunk that a post about a fully automated coffee machine would cause a geek stampede.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If you put computer terminals in there, and little tubes that drip coffee directly into your mouth, some slashdotters would never go home.
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080331.html
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080401.html
Here it is.
Skyshadow's Law: The more complicated the coffee maker, the worse off you are.
The best cup of coffee I've ever found is from a little coffee shop near my wife's office in San Francisco (I won't say the name, but it's near the SoMa Caltrain station). They make their excellent brew in a decidedly low-tech way:
Each customer chooses the type of coffee they want or (and this is a better option) tell the barrista to use their judgement. The beans are scooped up, ground and then poured into a very conventional filter basket along with enough water to produce one cup of coffee.
And that's it -- the best cup of java you're likely to find made by probably the lowest-tech possible method.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Of course it doesn't run Java!
If it did, the coffee machine would need 15 mins to start, require all the beans to be named a certain way, the path to each individual bean type explicitly defined in the CLASSPATH, and would freeze for 20mins doing garbage collection, usually at the most inappropriate time.
So this is just the coffee version of newer Krispy Kreme stores? I'm excited. I'd love to go visit.
I have never understood the appeal of coffee.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Just feed it straight to my veins.
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080401.html
This is all just shallow thinking to maximize short-term profits. In that sense, it is just plain dumb, albeit in a spectacular bling-blingy sort of way.
But is the Java bot compliant with personal Java spec revision 123342.432687 from RFC 5 Robotlabs certificate B?
Not a particularly new idea, but it all takes effort to make it happen. I thought something like this might be good for bars too (wine + beer).
A related idea was Gravity Cooking, where the food drops down a tube , a long tube, and gets cooked this way or that way as it drops through different "areas "(chopping, frying, adding spices, combining, what-have-you ....)
Stephan
The site was down, so I couldn't actually read the article, but roasting takes a fair amount of time to get right. From the summary it made it sound like it was doing micro roasting for every drink. Roasting also smells pretty... weird, I wouldn't call it a bad smell but it doesn't smell like the finished product either.
There have also been machines around for a long time that do everything including steaming the milk, although much smaller. They are called super automatics in the industry. http://www.wholelattelove.com/reviews.cfm?ItemID=1130#reviewfaq
Not saying this isn't cool, but I don't think you'll see most coffee shops doing this.
Let me get this straight...the coffee goes from green bean to brewed cup in the matter of (tens of?) minutes? Any true coffee connoisseur knows that "the coffee attains its peak 4 to 24 hours after roasting." Ref: http://www.sweetmarias.com/ and http://www.coffeekid.com/ and alt.coffee.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Cool. So then I can take my perfectly roasted coffee to my office and put it in the piece of sh*t Mr. Coffee machine that looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the Vietnam war. Ah, progress!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
With a couple pictures...
http://www.bornrich.org/entry/walk-in-for-a-cuppa-coffee-from-javabot
Someone should open a store that does this with marijuana instead of coffee. I think total automation so the consumer doesn't have to do anything but suck in the nifty chemical would go even better with potheads than wired coffee addicts who need something to do with their ampup.
Something like this would put Vancouver on the map.
--
make install -not war
But does it run Linux?
...When we require our coffee to entertain us while it is in the process of brewing.
Textbook/profs in the future will have to distinguish one more term: Java, Javascript, JavaBot...
Ah, a luddite. How cute.
I've got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.
E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There's been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19'th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn't self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you'd have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you'd stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.
E.g., the fact that they're clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn't be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.
E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it's only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.
E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB's demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.
E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don't think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a "highly reproducible mechanical process".
Etc, etc, etc.
Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...caused its own stampede, when it first went online. The Cambridge Coffeepot was perhaps the most famous webcam - and certainy the most famous coffeepot - on the planet for many years. This proves the neoclassic CaffeGeek Theorum which states that (extreme chaos) = (geek quotient) * (caffeine)^2, or e=gc^2. Einstein was close to discovering this, but falsely assumed that he could use the brain's mass rather than the geek quotient, leading to his incorrect conclusion that e=mc^2.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I agree with the notion that much work needs to be automated, some things arguably must be automated. However, people must work. Carrying the practice of automation to its complete ultimate conclusion is foolish and self-destructive. We are not in a resource-abundant era like the one you describe, we are in a resource-scarce era. There are not enough resources on the planet for there to be a middle-class in China proportionately as large and as consumerist as in the US. Not enough metals, fuel, plastic feedstocks, lumber, wheat, etc. More automation will not magically reverse this, and would slow down the creation of acceptable jobs. It would probably be better to create human-operated machines that maximize human employment, not minimize it.
Your comparison with Luddites is certainly obvious, not to mention cliche, but is inapt due to the vastly different historical circumstances between then and now.
...are we scared yet?
I remember playing an game from a Commodore 64 (128?) magazine where you manually controlled an assembly-line-style coffee machine with a conveyor belt; it looked a good bit like this, except the pipes were for cream and sugar and stuff. The more things change...
The Javabot will run fast internally, and everyone will talk about how fast it is, but in actual observable output will be slow.
The Javabot will be marketed to run everywhere, but for the first several years of its existence will really only run in one or two places. Other bots do this already, but for some reason it's only the Javabot that gets noticed.
The Javabot will collect its own waste (garbage) so it theoretically will use less power than other bots, but in reality will consume orders of magnitude more. Mini Javabots will be available which don't consume their own waste and also don't consume much power, but will be ignored.
The Javabot will succeed by force of marketing power alone.
The Javabot will be marketed as having the best usability of any bot, but will actually require several versions of itself before being relatively useful.
The Javabot will require multiple versions of itself to be present to perform all necessary tasks.
The Javabot will need to be informed of where all its parts are in order to run- not in a general sense of "The parts are in the bin", but rather "part A is in the bin", "part B is in the bin", etc.
Because the Javabot doesn't use enough power by itself, it will be embedded inside other bots, such as database bots.
The Javabot will consume power while not on, and will need to add to itself periodically.
Different features of the Javabot will have really cool names like 'JBEE' and 'JavaBotBeans' which explain absolutely nothing about what they actually accomplish. One of the functions of the Javabot is to periodically come up with "new" features.
Javabot will run "standard" XML but only be able to exchange data with one other vendor using it. Marketing will make sure Javabot's method of "cross platform" data exchange is used instead of other actual cross platform methods.
Javabot will push itself down your throat and you will like it, you heathen!
(only slightly bitter)
Thanks for the free add.
The smell we all like in good coffee shops is the smell of roasted coffee. On the other hand, the smell of roasting coffee is borderline horrible. It has that burnt coffee overtone we associate with bad gas-station coffee sitting on hotplates in those round glass pots.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...is whether the coffee produced by the Javabot tastes good.
Never. It talks about "machine of the future," that it's purpose is "to produce the most flavorful cup of coffee available," efficiency, control, etc.
It does not say whether that purpose was achieved.
The writer does not say that he tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
The writer does not quote anyone who says they tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
FYI the site for the company is http://www.roastingplant.com
It's a nifty place. A couple of points: The summary makes it seem like you can choose your own blend to go into a drink that you order on-premises. Not true. They have pre-filled tubes with their "Roasting Plant Blend" and a bunch of single-origin coffees, and you can choose any one of those for them to make an espresso with. If you are buying beans to take home, of course you can get a little bit of the Papa New Guinea, a little bit of the Ethiopian Harrar, a little bit of the... and make your own blend, but it's not like the Javabot is doing the blending for you. I like their "Roasting Plant Blend" a lot and pick up a half-pound to bring home with me to use in my AeroPress. If you're in NYC and a coffee freak it's worth venturing there for the novelty, but be sure to stay eagle-eyed as you place your order, because the whole "beans being sucked through the tubes into the espresso machine" process is so fast that you just might miss it.
Does your pussy taste like coffee?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
If it were my coffee shop, I'd build a Rube Goldberg contraption instead of some dull, straightforward machine.
Acmebucks, we brew your coffee in 154 easy steps!
This thing is reminiscent of the Cloaca project's giant machine that consumes food and produces poop.
Honest to God, I once heard some ponce in San Francisco ordering a capuccino with half low-fat and half skim-milk foam. Jesus, what a fop.
That's really gay ---
I live about 5 minutes by foot from the Roasting Plant, and I can say with confidence that this is the best brewed coffee I've ever tasted. And I'm not the only one - the five or six friends (some of whom are connoisseurs) that I've taken to this place have all agreed that it's at or close to the top of all the coffee they've tasted.
The Rube Goldberg quality of the apparatus (it really is rather hypnotic to watch) naturally makes one suspicious that they sacrifice quality for spectacle, but the truth is that they designed the machine to make great coffee and then had a good designer make it pretty.
They use great beans and they don't burn them like Starbucks does. Though they will have a hard time sourcing enough good beans if they become a large chain, at this point, it's not a problem.
BTW, I promise that I have no connection to this establishment other than liking their coffee.
Dan
It's the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine.
(Big Yawn)
When I can watch my coffee being GROWN via a live 24/7 satellite feed and Juan Valdez personally inspecting my every bean --- THEN I'll truly be impressed...
As I look at the 'machine', what hits me first is what a labor intensive nightmare it must be to keep clean... And for a coffee machine to produce quality coffee, cleanliness is extremely important.
For all of us who implement those 50-purpose tools into a single interface program, we can finally add our "Make Coffee" button!
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
After all, anybody who pays $4 for a cup of coffee probably isn't there just because they like the taste of coffee... they're there to hit on the barista! (Yes, my sister and my mom have worked as baristas... my mom was fired because she didn't have the prerequisite piercings.)
It doesn't roast, but it grinds and brews a cup at a time. http://www.starbucks.com/business/icup.html
First post! (just in case I am...)
I work in a coffee roastery, while i am studying,who have won the Australia Golden Bean in previous years . I know that a lot of the top cafes will age their coffee about a week before they use their coffee, not to mention that they can't even make an automated coffee machine that can make a decent flat white without over extracting the coffee what makes them think they can automate the whole system?
I love coffee, but hate espresso, which is mostly all you can buy nowdays.
Starbucks tries to sell coffee, but their product relates to coffee in the same way that a vacuum cleaner resembles a supercharger.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Its not lupus. -DH
>The best things in life tend to be a bit bitter or astringent or have some sort of strong flavor
:)
>that isn't well appreciated by all. Black coffee, dark chocolate, pale ale, dry wine, skunky herb,
>smelly cheese, etc etc. All of these have flavor components that might be unpleasant, but in the
>right context to an appreciative palate they're truly wonderful. Try to expand your horizons,
>and challenge your palate a little bit. The alternative is a bland, flavorless life.
I like spicy food, so I don't have a bland, flavorless life. I just don't like bitter things - I prefer sweet, salty, and spicy things.
Coffee is bitter. I absolutely detest pale ale. I hate dry wines, and prefer sweet ones. I don't know what a skunky herb is, unless it's a smelly guy named herb
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I remember the first (and last) time I had an IPA. I could not figure out why my roomate thought that stuff was so good. Nasty nasty stuff. Like drinking battery acid, I would imagine. Give me a milkshake.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
(For those who didn't want to click, that's the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. HTCPCP was "introduced" April 1, 1998.)
I understand that it even has a cage where civet cats crap out steamy fresh Kopi Luwak beans.
Mmmm...
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