My coffee machine controller is now open source. I have uploaded the firmware and hardware design to GitHub. This meant I needed a catchy name. I have always just called my controller “coffeepid”, which is pretty generic.

After a conversation with several coffee machine modder friends (thanks guys), I settled on “Hot Metal Brewbot”.

Do you need an explanation? Right then…

It’s a (delightfully bad) pun on the hot metal printing press and an espresso press. It also describes the thing we are controlling, i.e. the boiler. And I think it sounds kind of cool.

The name was already claimed by the HoTMetaL HTML editor but that is now defunct. Searching on GitHub, there are a few random projects using the name but nothing obviously popular and nothing related to coffee. And (if you share my dry sense of humour) this gives us another justification for the name: if a programming language can be named after an island where coffee is grown and a derivative of that language can become a standard adjunct to HTML, then why can’t a coffee machine controller be named after an HTML editor?

So there.