← Industrial design & 3D Industrial design & 3D · 2022

Smart Coffee Plate

Never burn your tongue again

I drink a lot of hot drinks, and I hate testing whether one has cooled enough to drink. So I designed and built a plate that does it for me. Put your cup on it, and an infrared sensor tracks the temperature until it reaches the right range. Then a green light, a message on the LCD and a buzzer tell you your drink is ready.

• Electronics: Arduino Uno, an MLX90614 infrared temperature sensor, a 16×2 LCD, a piezo buzzer, red and green LEDs, an on/off switch, and battery or wall power.
• Logic: red light while the drink cools, then green, an LCD message and 5 beeps when it's ready. A 2-minute pause stops the repeat beeps, and it resets when you lift the cup. Friends who study engineering helped with the code.
• Two enclosure versions modeled in SolidWorks and 3D printed. Version 2 fixed everything Version 1 got wrong. In real use, it took about 10 minutes for a drink to reach the right temperature.