To control our coffee pot we had many hurdles to overcome. We needed to be able to switch a pot on and off from Silverlight.

PC Interface

This past week I was honored to be invited to the premiere of “Code of the West –Alive and Well in Wyoming.” No, I did not have to travel to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The premiere took place at the Hilton Conference Center in our very own Laramie, Wyoming. Based on the book Code of the West by Mr. Jim Owens, the movie illustrates how many of the principles from this book are exemplified every day by the people of this great state.

Handel Information Technologies, Inc. is at the 2010 CWLA Conference in Washington D.C. If you are there, please stop by Booth #17 and the cybercafé which we are sponsoring, and visit us. This year we wanted to do something different just to show that you can easily configure your own custom solution very quickly on the RiteTrack Silverlight platform using our Design Studio Suite.

This is the first post in a series of posts about CoffeeTrack. Coffee Track was Product Development’s entry into the first ever RiteTrack challenge.  What our team set out to do was to change what people think RiteTrack can connect and integrate with.  Our mission was to provide a complete coffee tracking system for our office.

Goals

1. Track coffee level.
2. Track when a new pot is done.
3. Track whether or not a pot is empty.
4. Track personal coffee consumption.
5. Notify via twitter when an event occurs.
6. Remotely command the coffee pot using RiteTrack and twitter.

Technology leveraged

1. Silverlight 4
   1. Webcam
   2. COM Automation for serial port access
2. Custom electronics
   1. Arduino
   2. Wireless light controller
3. Twitter
4. Cell phone (to control twitter)
5. RiteTrack 4
6. Image processing
7. Barcode scanner

Firsts!

1. First time a soldering iron has been used with RiteTrack
2. First time we have tracked coffee using RiteTrack
3. First time we have developed image processing algorithms for RiteTrack.
4. First time we have used a bread board with RiteTrack
5. First time we have used Silverlight 4 with RiteTrack.
6. First time we have used a webcam with RiteTrack.
7. First time we have communicated with a serial port using RiteTrack.
8. First time RiteTrack with Twitter have been used to control something.

Technology can yield 6 Million Dollar benefits for Social Services.