Coffee Maker, Blop Edition

Welcome to “Coffee Maker, Blop Edition”, where your dreams come true... If yours are about feeding coffee to blops.

The game is about following recipes using color beans, temperature and two ingredients, a very basic coffee maker simulator.

In this way, the game was created for Windows PC, following the basis of the proposal made in the subject “Entertainment Systems”, where we had to locate a damaged, old or non-functioning object and turn it into an alternative controller.

When we started, we didn't have much of an idea of the game concept, since that first week we were only focused on building the controller. But we ended up agreeing to make a simple and rather silly game, working more on the manual part of creating the controller.

This made the project more labor-intensive, and we gained new knowledge about connecting inputs and outputs, realizing how to connect a colour senser, as well as the potentiometer, besides the inventions that arose according to the impasses we had.

But now on to the broken object,  we chose a coffee machine, where we decided to create the following inputs and outputs:

1 Coffee Handle

• Bean Sensor
• Using only a color sensor, connected to the arduino, it was possible to read the color of the coffee beans, beads, placed in front of it.
• This way, according to the request, the players only had to place the color the customer asked for in front of the sensor.

3 Push Button

• Ready 
  • The player presses this button to deliver the coffee, however, the game will read whether the recipe has been followed correctly. If not, a red feedback color, such as incorrect, will be visible inside the game's coffee mug.
  • If it's right, the player will be able to see the color of the drink, for example, if the drink is milk blueberry, the color will be blue and a new customer will appear.

• Milk
  • By pressing the button on the coffee machine, the player will be able to add milk to their drink, according to the order.
  •  The button on the screen will appear grayed out, as if it had been selected.
• Sugar
• By pressing the button on the coffee machine, the player will be able to add sugar to their drink, according to the order.
•  The button on the screen will appear grayed out, as if it had been selected.

1 Turning Button

• Temperature
• Using a potentiometer, it is possible to detect how much temperature the player is trying to put into the game when they start turning the button.
• As the player changes the temperature of the drink, by rotating the button, a bar in the game starts to go up and down according to the input.

2 LEDs

• Correct, Wrong
• Using LEDs to replace the original lights, it was possible to modify the code so that when it received the “Ready” input and then detected whether the player had followed the recipe correctly or not, the green light would come on, or in turn, the red light would turn on.
• Green Light, correct order, next customer comes. Red Light, incorrect order, player has to recreate the order again.

Based on this information, all the buttons, as well as the sensor, were connected to the Arduino Nano Extension Board, which in turn was connected to the Arduino Nano Maker that passed on the inputs via the USB connection.

In the Arduino program, it was necessary to install the “Adafruit TCS34725” library so that the light sensor could be read, as well as the actions taken by the buttons,  which would then be read by Unity through the Serial Monitor.

That's all, we hope you enjoy this project as much as we have over the past two weeks!