Coffee has a seemingly unsolvable problem: how are you supposed to make coffee if you haven’t yet had coffee? It’s the Coffee Drinker’s Dilemma, a catch-twenty-brew, if you will. It’s an impossibility, like picturing an object that is simultaneously only blue and only red. Impossible, that is, unless you are good with Legos.
Brought to our attention by Nerdist, one Lego mastermind figured out a way to turn tiny little children’s bricks into a mechanized add-on to a Mr. Coffee that makes the automatic machine a little more automatic. Posted to his YouTube channel, Brick Science—whose real name is Riley—sought a means to having coffee brewed and ready when he woke up. And being a Lego wizard, the medium for doing so seems pretty obvious.
Over the course of the nine-minute video, Riley creates a four-stage Lego machine to handle each step of the Mr. Coffee brewing process: opening the lid, pouring the water, adding the coffee, and pressing the brew button. Using a pump, four Lego Technic motors, a programmable “intelligent brick” to code the steps, and a whole host of Lego pieces, Riley builds the entire contraption in around 3.5 hours. And perhaps to everyone’s surprise, it works pretty well.
Now, the cynics out there—of which I am most certainly not—might note that all the issues the Lego machine is solving can be overcome in simpler ways like, say, just loading up the coffee maker with water and ground the night before and using Mr. Coffee’s programmable timer to start brewing before you wake up. Again, it’s not me saying that, it’s the cynics. (An even more cynical person my advise Riley to purchase a better home coffee maker, but that’s none of my business.) I love fun and this solution is certainly way more fun. And it answers the question: why spend 3.5 hours over-engineering a solution when you can just wake up 10 minutes earlier? Because Legos, that’s why.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
