Starbucks Drinks Concentrate Dispenser

Project Requirements

For my team’s engineering capstone final project, we were tasked by Starbucks Coffee company with designing and constructing a prototype of a new automated system to pump drinks concentrate for Starbucks beverages to a countertop dispenser.

The prototype machine had to fit within a constrained space under a counter, store 4 different concentrate flavors in 3 liter vessels, and pump concentrate in predetermined recipes to fill standard Starbucks drink sizes at 2.5 fl. oz per second.

My contributions

As the team member with the mos experience with microcontrollers and mechatronics, I was in charge of designing, assembling, and programming the entire electrical system for our machine.

I used two Arduino Unos wired together with a serial connection, one to receive button presses and the other to run the motor controllers. Using two microcontrollers greatly simplified wiring, and avoided having to use a potentially more expensive microcontroller with more I/O pins.

Custom perf-board circuits to control motors (left) and receive button inputs (right)

Testing button inputs