Greenbox Barista
When the contemporary art museum Z33 needed a coffee bar for their museum, they approached Cream on Chrome to create a coffee bar. The result was the Greenbox Barista: a coffee machine that requires people to be involved in the coffee-making process by necessitating manual actions at every step. The installation communicates with the user via light signals embedded throughout the machine. This gives making coffee an arcade-like experience.
Coffee Installation in the museum
Closeup of the coffee carafe
Water storage station
Approach
The installation was built around the user experience, incorporating an old military water pump to supply water and utilizing an old sewing machine hand crank to start the coffee grinder. The counter was designed to house all the required electronics. As this is a one-off installation, we aimed to use as many readily available modules as possible. However, it was decided to design a custom control board to enhance the reliability of the installation.
My responsibilities
Within the project, I designed a custom PCB that could read all sensors and buttons, and control the heaters, pumps, and coffee grinder accordingly. It also controlled all the hundreds of LEDs throughout the installation.
I also wrote the firmware to make the installation behave as the designers intended and assisted in implementing the wiring.
A short video about the project
Photograpy and video by Cream on Chrome