Software-Defined Coffee Machine

When I go to a hotel, a key component of the experience is the morning coffee. I am a Swede, and I want my coffee strong and plentiful. In most places outside the Nordic countries, this means figuring out the best approximation in the menus of coffee machines.

During vacation this summer, we stayed in a hotel where there was indeed a coffee machine that had to be mastered in order to have a decent breakfast. The first morning, it featured a “large coffee” option that pretty much perfectly fit the bill. However, something happened the second morning…

When we got down to the hotel restaurant, the staff seemed to be doing some simple maintenance of the coffee machines. Getting closer, it became clear that they were doing maintenance that was not so basic – they were actually performing software updates! The result was a brand new menu where the large coffee was gone, forcing me to order an Americano, which turned out to be not quite the same thing.

This offers an inadvertent but clear illustration of how software can change the characteristics of a device – even with exactly the same hardware underneath, the available coffee variants changed. The functionality offered to the user was substantially different by changing the parameters and maybe even the control code, even as the hardware stayed constant.

That is the essence of software-defined vehicles – and indeed software-defined anything. Use a single hardware platform in different ways depending on the software load. It might mean adding new functionality to products that are already out in the world (over-the-air updates, ideally), or it might mean doing different things with the same hardware product to target a new market.

The coffee example here is kind of both. Clearly, it is an example of updating existing hardware with new functionality in the field. But it also shows how the manufacturer found a way to create a branded product for hotels. Using software, it is easy to add the hotel logo to the screen saver. Doing this physically would require manufacturing customer-specific plates or signs. With software, it is just an image file to do some image work.

I also admit loving the image used when the machine was out of order…

Happy coffee cup when it cannot serve any coffee cups. The irony. At least the error message is clear.

When it comes to developing software for a machine like this, a simulation environment can be a real game-changer. Especially one that combines software execution with a simulation of the dynamics of the brewing system. Engineers can see how their code behaves in realistic conditions without waiting for hardware or risking damage to an expensive prototype. Imagine the fun that can be had if you experiment freely with a system that runs a coffee grinder and is able to boil water and steam milk.

Cadence has a full range of products to simulate everything from computer systems to systems dynamics to the world around it.