Instructables contributor iminthebathroom posted this video of his wife filling up the R2-D2 “Dark Roast Edition” coffee maker to prove to us that it really works.

Just pour the water in his head, and out drips the coffee through that funky looking orb/filter basket in front of him and into the carafe. R2 started out as a Bunn industrial coffee maker, along with a bunch of custom parts including aluminum, brass, copper and steel. While you could follow the Instructable for building your own, we can only hope that Mr. Coffee and Lucasfilm see this thing and decide to produce their own R2 coffee maker for the rest of us.

[via R2D2Central]

Simeon from Two Lives Left noticed that his tan leather Smart Cover was getting worn by his hand, so he decided to try and stain it with coffee. First, he tried to paint it with coffee, let it set and then towel off the excess. He painted it with a few coats, letting it set and wiping off the excess each time. Then, he decided to rub in some ground coffee for additional color.

The resulting cover looks pretty good with its nice warm brown leather look, though it must smell of coffee pretty strongly. If you don’t like that, then you probably shouldn’t try this hack, and might want to just go with food coloring or dye instead.

[via Ubergizmo]

The Handpresso Auto is a neat, single-serve portable espresso machine that will give you a perfect, steaming cup of espresso, anytime and anywhere you want one. It’s shaped like a tumbler so it can fit into your car’s cup holder and plugs into the car lighter socket for power.

All you need to get your coffee fix is water, an ESE espresso pod of your choice, and a few seconds of waiting before your cup of coffee is ready.

The Handpresso Auto Machine is available online for €149.00 (~$197.)

These coffee cup memory card readers from Green House(JP) definitely stand out from the crowd, and will look great sitting on your desktop alongside your real coffee mug. Though at just about 2.3″ in diameter, it’s more like an espresso cup than the big coffee mugs I’m used to drinking from.

They plug straight into your USB port, and can read a whopping 47 different media card formats (many of which are only slight variants and capacities of the same standard). For starters, it supports Compact Flash I/II, SD, SDHC, SDXC, mini SD, micro SDHC, Micro SDHC UHS-I, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo, and Double Tall Half-Caf Cappucino. Just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention there. Clearly, you wouldn’t want to accidentally pour your morning cuppa joe into this thing unless you want to fry both it and your computer.

They’re available from GeekStuff4U for about $43 (USD), and come in the brown, green, violet or white colors shown above.

What Virus actually did was grind up these coffee beans to come up with coffee charcoal, which they’ve (not so) cleverly called Coffee Char. The char was then processed and incorporated into a natural fiber, which serves as the base layer fabric that make the garments act more like insulators, raising skin temperature by as much as 10°F.

You might be thinking that sportswear that traps heat will end up making you feel all sticky and gross, right? Wrong, because the Stay Warm suits were made to wick the moisture away from your skin. The suits also have UV shielding and anti-odor properties that make sure you don’t stink while doing whatever it is you’re doing.

You can check out the entire range of suits from the Virus Action Sport Performance Stay Warm line on their site right here.

[via Gizmag]

This special vending machine uses drips of coffee poured carefully through milk to form a face on the top of your hot beverage. In this particular case, it makes the face of a woman, floating in your foamy cuppa cappu. Apparently, that’s a pattern that Yojiya Cafe teaches its human baristas to make too. Here’s a video clip of the machine working it’s magic. Trust me when I say that since it does all of its tricks behind closed doors, it’s not very thrilling though.

Heck, there could be a little tiny barista in there doing that for all I know. From what I can tell, the face is the only pattern this machine makes, but it would be cool if you could pick from others. I’m sure they’ll eventually figure that out if they haven’t already.

This particular machine is located at the Yojiya Cafe in Haneda Airport if you happen to be in Tokyo and want to check it out for yourself.

[via YouTube]

Naturally, Darth Vader can’t have his Starbucks stationary, since the Dark Side is always on the go. This Starbucks is conveniently inside an AT-AT so at least on those long Hoth patrols in the cold, Vader and his personal Snowtroopers can get a warm drink.

Too bad the AT-AT is so vulnerable to a simple cable tied around its legs. I would hate to be inside that room filled with hot coffee when it topples over while walking. Oh, and what is with the cat storage area?

[via Buzzfeed]

These drink mixes come in their own lithographed metal cans and are branded with one of our favorite characters of the Star Wars universe. The three drinks include Vader’s Dark Side Roast, Chewbacca’s Hoth Cocoa, and Yoda’s Dagobah Green Tea. I could be down with some Hoth Cocoa on a cold day – that sounds good.

The three flavors come together in one set. I’m not sure how large the cans actually are, but there’s just a small sampling of each. There are three ounces of ground coffee, an ounce of tea leaves, and 8 ounces of cocoa mix. That’s not a lot, but let’s face it you are paying for the cans much more than the contents. You can get the set now for $29.99 (USD) over at ThinkGeek.

For those of you that just have to have your hot coffee, this concept is for you. It’s called the Black Luk, and it was designed by Song Ah Lee. It mounts to the wall and looks more like a clock than a coffee maker. The circular coffee maker has a specially sized cup you cram in that dent to get your brew.

I can see this being a huge mess. It would probably drip coffee down the wall every time you pull your cup out. I wonder how you get water in it without spilling either. There seems to be a sliding door on top for the water, filters and coffee. It’s cool looking, but it seems that just using the old Mr. Coffee maker would do the trick.

[via Yanko Design]

The Pipe Mug is made of high-quality ceramic. It measures 4.25″ tall and 4″ wide and has a capacity of 14 oz. Although it’s microwave-friendly, Fangamer says that “nuking it could hurt its lifespan”, and that you should wash it by hand to make the color last longer.

You can buy the Pipe Mug from Fangamer for $35 (USD). It comes with a random one of four custom-molded Block Coasters, which you can buy as a set for $12 too. Someone should mod it so that it makes the pipe sound effect when something is put inside.

This mug stirs itself, so that you can enjoy your hot drinks, even when you’re super lazy. All you need to do is press a button on this mug and voilà! It works for cream, sugar, and hot chocolate. It comes with a handy spill-proof lid. It needs 2 AAA batteries to function.

It’s available on Amazon and ThinkGeek for $19. All that I need now is a self-heating, self-stirring mug and I’m golden.

[via GeekAlerts]

Nope, the reason I couldn’t solve it was the 170-degree scalding coffee that spilled all over my hands when I turned it over.

The Rubik’s Cube Mug is available over at Perpetual Kid for $12.99 (USD). Goes great with the Rubik’s Cube coasters.

In case you aren’t very familiar with who (or what) Bob-omb is, they’re actually those tiny, mechanical wind-up bombs in the Super Mario Bros. games that walk towards you and perch down when they’re ready to explode, hoping for either Mario or Luigi to walk close by.

If you’re like me, then you probably can’t get through the day without at least having one steaming mug of coffee. With the Wind Up Mug, you can literally sit back in your seat and unwind as you sip some awesomely brewed goodness.

Available from Baron Bob’s for $11.95 each.

This espresso gun concept was created by designers Stefan Riegebauer, Christina Carli, Florian Kainz and Niko Schwarz. The design is a play on the fact that quantities of espresso are referred to as shots. Water goes into the gun’s handle and prepared in one of the pistol’s chambers. Once the shot is ready to go, you can press a trigger to release it. The beans would be ground in some kind of a dock, but I think that you could probably use your own coffee bean grinder for this since the heating element and water reservoir would be built into the gun itself.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Part of the idea behind this design is to eliminate the waste often associated with those single-shot espresso machines that have their own coffee capsules.

For now, I think I still prefer my vacuum coffee maker to this gun concept.

[via Yanko Design]

There, I said it. My day is literally incomplete if I don’t have at least one cup of joe in my system. A steaming mug is all I need to go from blah to TADA! in a jiffy. That said, one of my greatest pet peeves is pouring coffee out of the pot only to find that someone turned it off and let the coffee go cold.

Jung Eun Park’s solution? The Boog Coffee Warmer!

It looks just like a typical spoon or stirrer right off the bat, but pull on that little ringed end over there and you’ve got yourself a handy and portable coffee warmer on-the-go.

The wide end of the Boog actually contains a packet of calcium chloride while the farther end of its hollow interior contains a few milliliters of water. Pulling on the red tab will combine the two substances and set off an exothermic (or heat releasing) chemical reaction that will provide the needed heat to up the temperature of your brew up a few degrees in a couple of minutes.

It’s still a concept for now, but I can definitely see the Boog’s potential of changing up the way people enjoy their mid-afternoon coffee.

[via Yanko Design]

That material is a solid at room temperature and when you drop it in coffee that is in the 140 degree range it absorbs the heat and the material inside melts. As it absorbs heat, it will cool your coffee three times faster than normal and keep you from burning your taste buds off.

The paradox part comes in the fact that while these things absorb heat and cool the coffee to start, once that material inside starts to harden it puts some of that heat back into your drink to make it warmer for twice as long. These beans are on Kickstarter right now to land funding and are well over the amount they need, but you can still contribute to the project if you want. A pledge of $40 or more will get you a set of five Joulies for yourself.

You can now pay for your coffee if you use the iPhone or a Blackberry using the official Starbucks App. The app can be funded using your credit card or PayPal. Once you have money in your app account all you need to do is place your order and then hold your device with the barcode on the screen under the scanner at the counter.

The app deducts the money from your account automatically. This would be the perfect app for people who end up shocked at the end of the month that they spent hundreds of dollars on coffee alone. You can only put what you want to spend for the month in the app and when it’s gone, you drink the swill at the office. Starbucks claims the app is the fastest way to pay for drinks now.

You know those little cardboard things that go around your cup of coffee at Starbucks? They’re actually pretty ingenious if you think about it. I mean, not only do they function as a buffer between the hot cup and your hand, but they can be used as a form of advertisement. So the company has found a way to bring advertising to their customers, while providing something useful. That’s just plain smart. So why do I hate these RuMe CUFF wallets so much?

After all, they too serve dual purposes. They keep your hand from getting burned, and hold your money. Just because you can make something that does two things, doesn’t mean you should. First, do you really carry a cup of coffee with you so often that it could actually replace your wallet? Second, do you have so few things in your wallet that it’s going to fit nicely around a cup of Joe? Third, and I can’t stress this one enough, you will throw this away at some point. No matter how hard you try, eventually you’ll chuck your cup into the trash instinctively, while donating your funds to the city dump.

There are probably a dozen other reason why this thing is a bad buy. Sure, it’s only $10. But then again, you already have a wallet, and you get one of those cardboard things for free with your coffee. The product page does mention that you can also use it as an armband as well. I still stand by my previous thoughts. Why waste time and money on this thing?

[via Delete Yourself]

Well if you think like the guys at Chambers Judd, you might imagine it doing something like this…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Yep, that’s right, this particular floppy drive sprouts legs to avoid spills. Floppy Legs is one of several creations of their fictitious “Attenborough Design Group”, which takes concepts found in nature to create products which automatically defend themselves from everyday threats. You can check out more of their wacky creations here.

The TARDIS mug is guaranteed to keep your coffee hot, while it can also transport it nearly instantaneously to any location in time or space. Heck, you can even send your coffee across the office to your boss and spill it in his lap if you so desire.

Each TARDIS mug even comes with an authentic police call box lid to keep your java hot while it whizzes across the universe. Entertainment Earth is taking pre-orders for the $18.99(USD) mug to start shipping this October. But if you already have a TARDIS, you could just transport yourself into the future to receive yours now.

I wonder if the mug actually holds much more coffee than it looks like it can hold from the outside. That would be cool  – if not physically impossible.