This project was concieved of and created as part of my master’s thesis at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), New York University
Proposition:
Use Data from news feeds to brew a cup of coffee which is representative of those news feeds.
Background:
It is possible to encode data into taste and deliver it to someone in the form of a beverage. Coffee and tea offer a number of distinct possibilities for use as informatic beverages as they are well suited to information encoding having many different varieties and being incredibly flavorful with a wide range of characteristics that are tastable by humans. Since coffee, tea and news are a classic pairing, often enjoyed together we have decided to use coffee and or teaas a delivery system for the daily news. Because Coffee is farmed in countries spanning 4 continents, coffee beans from each region are used to represent news from that region. A tastable version of the news is created in which a region’s presence in the news is reflected by its presence in the dispensed beverage.
Technology:
NewsBrews is a coffee brewing apparatus which uses information parsed from internet news feeds to create a cup of coffee whose composition is indicative of the current news. The logic contained within the device itself is minimal. There is a pic chip (18f252) which controls motors and communications and a Lantronix Xport which connects to outside servers via internet. The process of encoding the news into a cup of coffee requires 2 separate translation stages. The first is a reduction of text to pure data and the second is a translation from information which is easily readable by humans ta format which is more easily used by machines.
Because the News Brews device is running off of a small microcontroller with somewhat limited logic abilities, it is necessary to use an external server for the task of parsing data from the news. For this task I have chosen to work with cgi scripts written in perl. Perl is a language ideally suited to completing this type of task with utmost efficiency. The first script I created for this purpose is here and delivers extensive information about the exact number of occurrences of my search words in the news, specifically the New York Times. This script was necessary for determining the accuracy of the code (currently, a minor variant of this code is under devalopment to store detailed results in a database for future analysis). This same raw information is tabulated and fed to the News Brews Device through this cgi. Information must be transmitted to the News Brews device in an exceedingly simple form, so the News Brews device receives only a short string of comma delimited characters which defines the percent of the daily news originating in each of 6 regions: Region 1: Central and South America, Region 2: Sub-Saharran Africa, Region 3: Middle East and Northern Africa, Region 4: Central and South Asia, Region 5: South East Asia, and Region 6 : Pacific.
Because the tree structures of different news feeds are not the same, the addition of a user selectable news feed mandates separate cgis for each feed. The NYT news feed is the most simple to parse as it delivers the full contents of the paper via XML. The BBC and FOX cgis are slightly more difficult to parse as they provide only headlines in XML which link to HTML pages. The News Brews device uses the “GET” function over HTTP protocol to connect to the server(nyu stage) housing the cgi scripts and requests whichever information the user has selected. The cgi scripts use the same protocol but with the benefit of a computer which has many basic functions built in invalidating the need to be aware of certain components of the protocol.
Once the News Brews device receives the news information it has requested from the cgi script, it uses this information to drive two motors, one stepper and one servo. Hoppers housing selected coffee varieties from each of the 6 regions rotate past a window in which they can be viewed by the user and are repeatedly passed over a small opening with a servo operated door mechanism. The door mechanism opens into a chute which delivers coffee beans to the hopper of a grinder where they await pulverization. Once ground, the beans are deposited in a paper filter where boiling water is pumped over them producing a cup of delicious, invigorating and data-packed coffee.
FOR ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION AND A LOOK AT THE NEWS BREWS COMMERCIAL(new commercials on the way) go to www.therealbenbrown.com/newsbrews
for For human readable webpages which instruct you how to make your coffee for the day, go to
NYT BBC FOX
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