Poseidon Coffee Capsule Holder

The best thing about coffee capsules is that you get to choose a different flavor every morning. The worst is that you have a chaotic drawer with 20 types of coffee in it. Some displays are commercially available but they make my kitchen look like my office, so there's only one solution: Build your own!

• A lasercutter.
• 2 plates of around 50x50cm. I used 3mm MDF and black acrylic, but anything sturdy works.
• 4 nuts and bolts, a dozen spacers.

To display the capsules we'll need a series of vertical paths just wide enough to fit one Nespresso capsule, with a slightly wider opening at the top so you can slide in the capsules. The vertical paths can be anything at all; I've previously made a Medusa where the capsules fit in her snaky hair, in this version it'll be the waves behind Poseidon.

To draw Poseidon, I took inspiration from a classic painting (not mine) and traced over it in some flashy green. Important is to make sure that your shape is recognizable, while avoiding lines thinner than 2 mm - if your original has a lot of shadows, that makes it easier. Don't worry about details here. All the green has to be connected to the border somewhere, otherwise it'll fall out of your eventual lasercut.

Import this image into Inkscape, and divide it into cuttable shapes by drawing straight lines (Shift F6), and smoothen out the whole thing using the Edit path by nodes command (F2). You could try to do this automatically, but I find that this generally does not end up looking good and it is faster and easier to just draw in the shapes. Use the "Smoothen nodes" command liberally to avoid sharp corners in your design. Keep in mind that you are cutting out whitespace, so the distance between your shapes is the thickness of your final design.

The waves are the easy part: first, add a single wavy line as above. Make the stroke 28mm thick. Now go to Path - Stroke to path (Ctrl Alt C). Voila! Copy this line a few times. Then, depending on its place on the final board, you widen the lines a bit at their highest point by dragging a single point; this will be the entry point for new capsules and it should be around 36mm.

It helps to color the background black occasionally, so you can see what the result looks like.

I highly recommend making at least one cardboard test version before you start using more expensive material, and checking the line width with a coffee capsule. In my experience, no matter how well you check in Inkscape, there is always at least one spot where the lines are a bit too tight or too loose for the capsules.

In each corner there's a little hole to fix the background to the front. Since our capsule's tops have to fit between the two, it's best to place a few spacers between. I used 3 spacers on every corner, but the necessary amount depends on the size of your overall design.

Proudly hang your new centerpiece on a wall or put it down next to your coffee machine. Hear the roar of the sea every time you make a cup of Joe. Good luck!