grack.com goes on an odyssey of getting a new coffeemaker, learning BTLE and how it works, reverse-engineering the Bluetooth interface and Android applications for a coffeemaker, writing a Rust-based CLI interface, and finally, hooking it all up to a GitHub actions bot that lets you brew a coffee just by filing an issue!

I’ve always been pretty content with using whatever coffeemaker I had nearby. For the last two or three years I’ve been using an old 2-in-1 Breville YouBrew coffeemaker, with a grinder built-in. It was a workhorse and worked perfectly until this September. A few months ago the machine asked me to run the regular descaling process to deal with our hard water, and this is where our adventure starts.

The Dinamica Plus is about $100 more than the Dinamica, and this cost is effectively for the privilege of brewing coffee from your phone (along with some other goodies, like defining your favorite or custom drinks from the couch). The application is difficult to use and a bit buggy, however. It will often fail to find the coffeemaker. Once you’ve connected, there’s no guarantee that it’ll allow you to connect again without wiping all the saved data from the application. It’s also integrated with some sort of online service that returns a 404.

The first question we need to answer is how we’re going to talk to this thing. We know it’s Bluetooth from the application’s insistence that Bluetooth be turned on. But it’s not showing up on my MacBook’s Bluetooth devices list, which means it’s somehow different than the common Bluetooth “Classic” audio and phone devices that show up there.

See the process they followed here.