Mugsy requires just whole beans and water to create your drink, and it lets you customise almost everything about how the two are combined, from how much coffee is used to the pattern in which the hot water is poured over the grounds. Of course, not everyone knows enough about coffee to select the perfect options.
Fortunately, Mugsy’s linked up to a database of different coffees with recipes for each one. Just scan the bar-code of your beans and you’ll get the recommended settings automatically. Alternatively, if you’ve got the settings you like, you can link them to an RFID tag (two keyring fobs come with Mugsy), and you can get the perfect cup each time, and not be infected with other people’s inferior settings.
As well as ordering up a brew using the standard controls, you can also text, tweet, Slack, email, or Alexa yourself up a cup of hot caffeine.
All the mechanicals are controlled by a Raspberry Pi that you can control to bend the machine to your whim, whether that’s tweaking parameters to the standard software, or writing your own code to take control of the hardware.