London, May 23 (ANI): A US company has developed a coffee machine that can simply be controlled by sending text messages.
Seattle-based Zipwhip's Textspresso can send and receive messages, allowing coffee drinkers to text their order directly to the machine to pick up later.
The machine can also add personalised messages onto the coffee's froth, with the help of edible ink.
The company has no plans to mass-produce the machine, but it is making available the instructions and source code.
"You heard right," the BBC quoted the company writing in its blog.
"We've got a robotic barista in the house," the blog read.
Zipwhip, a cloud text messaging service, said they had produced the machine as way of highlighting the abilities of its wider business.
"We've had a lot of people each from all over the world wanting to distribute this thing," John Lauer, the company's chief executive said.
"We have been prepping the open source plans - and we are going to launch those. People could do modifications, that would be really thrilling for us," he said.
The machine itself is a standard coffee maker manufactured by Jura.
Instead of a human operator, the machine is activated using a specially programmed Arduino microcontroller.
Arduino is an open-source platform used for prototyping interactive electronics.
Zipwhip were able to write computer code to interpret the instructions sent in through text message. The system made use of Zipwhip's own Android mobile app.
"The build was completed with lots of head-scratching and weekend work," the company said.
It has posted the code used to control the Arduino - written in the Java programming language - on its blog.
The machine has proved popular with both technology and coffee lovers.
Local blog SeattleCoffeeGear called it the "hardest working robot in the business".
Lauer said that he was delighted with the response, but was not looking to take the idea much further.
"Hey, if Starbucks want to come and buy the company for that machine... well, it just wouldn't make sense!" he said.
"We'll let someone else do it. If someone takes the open-source plan and starts a business around making these, it just means more users of our software," he added. (ANI)