The Roasting Plant Coffee Company in New York takes automated coffee production to a new level–its “Javabot” functioning as much like a small factory as a retail coffee shop.

Coffee beans (a choice of seven different beans, customer-blended) travel overhead in pneumatic tubes, whooshing between storage bins, a roasting station, a grinder and a brewing machine. The goal: offer the freshest, best-tasting cup of coffee

It uses a real-time distributed control system, run by a supervisory PC and bin-mounted microprocessors.