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Design

Tweet-a-Pot Of Coffee From Your Bed [Instructables How-To]

A non-morning person’s dream come true.

Sure, you can buy an automated coffee pot and set it to brew a fresh pot of joe the minute you start gaining consciousness in the morning, but what about when you want a fresh cup upon returning home at night?

The Tweet-a-Pot by Frenzy, a QA engineer at Instructables, is the latest in Twitter-enabled devices (See also: Stream Twitter From Your Nightstand), which lets you order coffee on the fly by merely tweeting to your coffee pot. Best part about this device? No dealing with grumpy baristas.

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You’ll first need to gather a drip coffee pot, an Arduino board, a Power Switch Tail and a computer running the Arduino IDE and Python programming language.

Set up your computer (the interface between the Arduino and Twitter) by installing the Python-Twitter library. Then, install the Arduino IDE so you can communicate with your Arduino via serial port.

After that, register your app with Twitter so you can get an API key. Go to dev.twitter.com, register your app and gather the access token, access token secret, consumer key and consumer secret. You’ll need this information to interface with the Twitter API.

Now set up the Python code, which uses the Python-Twitter library to search for the status of a certain user (in this case your coffee pot) as well as the specific hashtag you’ve associated with starting (and stopping) your machine. Grab the full Python code in Step 4, and the code to enable the Arduino to recognize the Python code in Step 5.

Since you’re using a Power Tail Switch, the hardware setup will be relatively easy. Connect your Arduino to your computer and make sure your serial port is set, then plug the Power Tail Switch into pin 13 and ground. Next hook up the coffee pot to the relay and plug the relay into the wall outlet.

Fill your coffee pot with water and coffee grounds and tweet to the account the code is following. In this case #driptwit starts the coffee and #driptwitstop turns the machine off. Now enjoy your coffee!

Visit the Instructables How-To for further instruction, more detailed photographs, and tips on where to buy materials.