NEW SITE

Most of the information contained here plus a slick infomercial for newsBrews can be found at www.therealbenbrown.com/newsbrews . In addition, I'm looking forward to getting all of my old projects posted to the site real soon.

Coffee Content by Feed

I have completed my cgi scripts to parse the necesssary information from the BBC and FOX RSS feeds as well as the NYTimes(it turns out that these feeds were a lot less machine readable than the times feed because they had style information as opposed to just trees). Yesterday's coffee content looked like this. Soon, the java applet which allows users without access to a news brews machine to make their own coffee will be launched. This infographic is a rough sketch of how it will look.
As an optimist, I like to think that there will come a time when the flavor of Yemeni mocha(representing the middle east) won't be so prominent, but in the meantime, it sure is tasty.

I started putting it together

here's the partially assembled mechanism

I got my plexi back from the shop

I made a plan for the mechanism

New Design

So I had a new idea for the news brews device design. The old plan was to have different hoppers of coffee beans set into a world map- the new idea is that the hoppers themselves rotate into position. They will have world maps, with the region of interest highlighted, printed on them.

Coffee over time

In response to concerns which have been voiced about the likelihood of news feeds providing a different brew from day to day, I submit the following graph of the frequency of world regions' appearance in the New York times. Note that though the middle east currently dominates the news most of the time, it falls below Asia, Africa, and Middle America at one point, and the secondary constituents of the coffee vary greatly.