Senior Engineering Class Brews Up Innovation With a Latte Art Machine

Engineering takes on many different forms, and it’s not limited to buildings and bridges. For Lipscomb Engineering seniors, there is an array of final projects that utilize their knowledge and skills. The students are formed into senior design teams and are given a choice of tasks and projects to work on. For example, there is a project on an electronic system to make parking easier, environmentally friendly buildings that could be built in other countries, a more accessible water system that can be utilized in places in need of clean water, and others.

One of the class projects for engineering seniors at Lipscomb this year is building and programming a latte art machine. A group of five students is working on it for the two semesters before they graduate, and the project doesn’t necessarily stop at that.

The assigned task for the team initially was building an espresso machine. The seniors, however, decided to challenge themselves and expand beyond that, coming up with an idea for the current project. Nate McLain, senior Interdisciplinary Engineering major, who is the project manager, said, “Most of us on the team thought that it (building an espresso machine) might be too easy or too boring, so we wanted to do something more challenging and interesting.”

McLain does a lot of dynamic communication between the professionals and the rest of the team. The team has an advisor, who is a professor, two students who take care of most of the mechanical engineering, and two students who are on the electrical side of the project. 

Starting with a base of an old 3D printer, students expanded to build a machine that would be able to dispense powder (cocoa, matcha, cinnamon) on a latte drink. Combining mechanical and electrical engineering, the senior design team has been able to come up with a structure and a code. Now, they have to refine them and program different patterns so that the machine will be able to “draw” with the powder on a latte foam.

The machine will likely not be ready to sell to potential customers by the end of the semester, but the next generation of seniors will be able to pick up the project and further refine it. Kris Pesnell, a senior Electrical Engineering major who is another member of the team, said “Where I see it going is you take your phone and either Bluetooth or send over an image of your face or whatever you want, and then it would extrapolate points from that, and then print whatever image you want on there, in cinnamon.” For now, the team is planning on making at least three patterns that the user will be able to choose from, and the machine will print. 

One of the main engineering principles used in the project is motion hardware. It is the precise way that the machine is programmed so that the actual printer head can move smoothly front and back, left to right to print the picture automatically. The first prototype of the machine incorporated more of the 3D printer’s initial functionality, which the team was not satisfied with. They then built the second prototype, which turned out to be more user-friendly and easier to work with.

One of the obstacles the students faced in the process was trying to rewire the initial electronics left from a 3D printer. McLain said, “It was a big challenge trying to get them to work for our purposes. When we had to do that, we had to trick the machine into thinking it was doing what it was supposed to do. That was very interesting. And we never got to make it do exactly what we wanted it to do. That’s actually why we just took out the electronics and put our own.”  

Both McLain and Pesnell said that the project helped their team get closer and learn how to work together better and efficiently. The students will also present The Latte Art Machine at the Student Scholar Symposium at Lipscomb on April 16-17, 2025.