Four versions of my drink mixing machine
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Found a little video of a drink mixing machine I built in late 2018. It was a cute machine. This was the fourth iteration of such machines for me.
The first one was basically a styrofoam box with ESP8266 (Tensilica Core) and programmed in Lua. A spark made me want to use something else. Fitting the fancy web interface was proving a bit problematic, so I built a new machine.
The second was built with a Raspberry Pi (ARM) and kept programming it with Lua. I got a little aluminium trolley, the kind they used in Brazil to carry nail polishers in salons, and built the machine around it. This machine was presented at LuaConf 2017.
People asked me to build a JS version, and so I did. It was the same hardware but I replaced the Raspberry Pi with a Tessel 2 board (MIPS + ARM). Tessel runs NodeJS with some really user-friendly modules. It feels like doing NodeJS stuff but controls hardware, it was a novelty way back when. I presented this machine at BrazilJS 2017.
Once I moved to the UK, I left all that stuff behind. Then people from the GDG Coimbra asked me to give a talk on their GDG DevFest in 2018, and they asked for a drink mixing machine. So I build a new one. Same software as the BrazilJS version, but the hardware had a much smaller footprint to make it easier to carry on a plane and assemble at the location.