Ground Control
Ground Control is a cutting-edge machine that seamlessly merges exceptional coffee brewing with remarkable technology inside. This extraordinary piece of equipment offers unparalleled coffee and tea experiences, capable of producing a rich 8-minute cold brew or a batch of espresso in less than a minute of work.
About Project
Project Highlights- Installed and used in LinkedIn and Twitch US-offices
- Has raised a $4.25 million series A round from a former Tesla CEO
- Featured on Bloomberg and SFChronicle
- Check the Ground Control’s Clutch review(★5.0) of OVERCODE
Founded in 2013, it breaks a fundamental principle of coffee brewing: don’t reuse the grounds. The Ground Control machine can target different tastes from the beans with each cycle of water, thanks to its ability to control options such as temperature and bean agitation.
The machine comes programmed with recipes for multiple cycles with adjustable parameters like temperature and time. Customers have the freedom to experiment and create their own recipes, as well as explore different ingredients.
Requirements
Ground Control team wanted to create a web app that they will provide to customers as a SaaS application on a subscription basis — for managing their multiple coffee machines based on location, gathering and displaying analytics from real physical devices, creating custom coffee brewing recipes, and sending them to IoT coffee machines.
We started with extensive UX research to dive deep into the coffee brewing process and the internal recipe settings (like cycles and stir time) used by the machines. Through this research, we realized the need for a super-admin role that could oversee the entire network of machines, manage them by serial numbers, and link them to individual user profiles.
Solution
OVERCODE built the whole web app from scratch. MVP included a web application interface for managing coffee machines, communication between physical devices and the AWS backend, and different user roles.
We created a web application using React.js, SWR, TypeScript, and Next.js. The backend combined Auth-0, Firestore, and AWS IoT based on the client’s suggestion. We hosted app on AWS Amplify and connected to CloudFlare. We also created AWS Lambda functions for sending data between AWS and real physical coffee machines, detecting their online status.
The main challenge was to find a communication way between the web application and IoT devices and create a business logic that will monitor the physical device’s availability and sync the data between the backend server and devices taking into account that the physical device could be offline sometimes.
It took ~9 months to deliver the product from A to Z. From there we’ve been supporting the client with additional changes and minor improvements.
10 Jul. 2023 —Overcode delivered an exceptional MVP that met all of our needs. The team was dedicated, responsive, and punctual. Their attention to detail and commitment to finishing the project on time and within budget were impressive.