A cocktail bar that builds the drink itself

The interesting part of this one was that almost nothing could be bought. A pump that moves a measured amount of liquid and can be cleaned between drinks is not a component you order, so it had to be designed, printed, and then driven by something.

Ordering a drink

My half was the ordering path. An ESP8266 runs a small web server on the local network and serves the page from its own memory, announcing itself over mDNS so there is no IP address to type. There is no app, no backend, and no cloud account. You join the network, open a page, choose a drink.

From there it becomes one byte on a serial line to the Arduino that owns the mechanics. The web side holds a busy flag until the Arduino reports back, so a second order placed mid-pour is refused rather than queued into the middle of the first one — with one glass under the spout, interleaving two drinks is the failure that matters.

The machine it drives

Behind that sits a carousel of bottles on a stepper, servo-driven press pumps, and relays for the pumped mixers. A recipe is not a list of millilitres but a list of rotations and presses. The frame was modelled in Blender; the pumps were designed in CAD and 3D printed, because a pump that moves a measured amount of liquid and can be cleaned between drinks is not something you order as a part.

It was a two-person student project and it looks like one. It is here because it is the clearest example of the thing this company is registered for twice: software talking to hardware that was designed in the same week.