IoT Smart Beverage MachinesSmart Solution for Smart Offices
The No.1 coffee brand by size & revenue in India offers coffee services through their flagship retail outlets, and through machines set up in your office premises. As part of corporate retail strategy, our customers generally set up the vending machines in their customer office premises, supply essentials (coffee & sugar sachets) on daily basis, and charge monthly. To offer a superior & consistent & customized coffee experience to every consumer on retail outlets, our customers decided to IoTify coffee machines, and digitize their menu & cloudify their billing operations. The main objectives are coffee beans should never run out of stock, customers should always get the same consistent flavor of coffee that they are accustomed to. And customer has chosen Kemsys as their IoT partner. That’s where Kemsys comes in.
Kemsys team has designed an IoT communication board that interacts with the Coffee machine controller board & HMI board on one side over UART, and interacts with Microsoft Azure Cloud on another side using RESTAPIs via 2G SIM card connectivity. This board plays a vital role in sending Device to Cloud messages & in receiving Cloud to Device commands. We have deployed Azure IoT Hub C-SDK, and used it to sync coffee consumption information & daily machine logs with Azure Cloud.
Kemsys team has provided relevant functionality to change the machine menu & Cappuccino / Latte preparation settings (configuring coffee beans, water, milk quantities, grinding time, etc… for beverage preparation) from remote locations using cloud portals.
Kemsys team has designed a touch-screen interface panel to dispense various beverages (Cappuccino, Espresso, Latte, Milk, Tea, and etc…). The HMI solution is designed around a 32-bit microprocessor.
Kemsys team has ported Android OS on 32-bit microprocessor, and HMI application is developed using QT tools – and achieved ultimate performance & tiny footprint.
Key Components:
- 32-bit ARM CPU
- STM-32
- LCD Display
- CapSense for Touchscreen
- QT for HMI application
- Android OS
Making Coffee Machines usher in Post-Covid World
The coffee machine comes with a touch panel, using which one can brew & enjoy their favorite cup of drink. Just to enable touchless interactions in the post-covid world, the Kemsys team has quickly come up with the following QR-based solution. QR code stickers have been attached to every machine with embedded machine code & single page web URL. On scanning the code using mobile phones, one can navigate to the web page, where the menu will be displayed. Consumers can select & confirm their drink.
Kemsys team has designed and developed the entire Azure-based IoT backend – which forwards the drink information as a C2D message to a specific coffee machine using MQTT protocol. Upon receiving the command, the IoT communication board instructs the machine controller board to brew the requested drink.
Kemsys team is quick and agile enough to design & develop the entire solution within 4 weeks, while covid lockdown is going on. This Scan & Drink application is deployed in that corporate office where coffee machines are placed and charged lump sum per month, and individual coffee cups tracking is not important.
Enabling touchless interactions, Tracking coffee consumption
The coffee machine comes with a touch panel, using which one can brew & enjoy their favorite cup of drink. Just to enable touchless interactions, in the post-covid world, and at the same time to keep track of – who has consumed & how many cups consumed, Kemsys team has quickly come up with the following BLE-based solution. This solution is deployed specifically for corporate customers.
Every employee to have a mobile app. Every coffee machine to have BLE beacons continuously advertises. The moment, the app is opened, the smartphone scans & displays the nearest coffee machines. Upon selection, the smartphone pairs with a relevant coffee machine. From this moment, the command exchange happens over BLE with the coffee machine and displays the menu. Once the user selects & confirms the menu item, the coffee machine brews the same.
Both smartphone & coffee machine – syncs this coffee consumption information with Azure cloud, for monthly billing purpose.
Management of Coffee Machines @ Scale
Kemsys team has IoTified all coffee machines, and connected to Microsoft Azure IoT Hub using C-SDK. Kemsys RDM software (Kemsys IP & Accelerator) played a big role in this digital transformation.
Kemsys team has quickly enabled map view of coffee machines, came up with dashboard with vital stats like – how many coffee machines are healthy & connected; and how many are down & need attention. This RDM comes with a simple interface to register, configure, and control individual coffee machines. One more interesting feature is, with the help of RDM, the Kemsys team has enabled remote firmware upgrade feature, and FOTA (firmware over the air) campaigns, targeting groups of coffee machines tagged with version & location – with latest patches.
+20000 coffee Machines | 4 Different Variants
