Solution Strategy

Technology: the Station reuses the machine-wide choices established in System Design, USB CDC transport and a shared, code-generated protocol, and builds on top of them with C++26 modules, Slint for the UI, and Boost.Asio/Boost.Cobalt for asynchronous execution.

Decomposition: domain logic, Pod communication, and UI presentation are kept as separate building blocks connected only through explicit interfaces, so the guest- and operator-facing UI can change independently of how Pods are discovered and addressed. See Building Block View.

Safety and reliability: a single Station-initiated request-response protocol, a single shared execution context for all asynchronous work, and an explicit timeout on every Pod exchange together keep it possible to reason about what the machine can be doing at any moment, and to always bring it to a stop. See Cross-Cutting Concepts.

Maintainability: recipes, ingredients, glasses, and the ingredient-to-dispenser mapping are plain data rather than code, so an operator or maintainer can add or adjust them without a rebuild. Module boundaries mirror business concepts rather than technical layers alone.

Usability: a small, fixed set of guest-facing screens is driven by a single active-page model, and the operator maintenance area is hidden behind a gesture and PIN so it never distracts a guest. See Runtime View.

Development without hardware: Pod discovery is built behind one common interface with both a real, serial-based implementation and a simulated one, selected at compile time, so most development and CI can run the full guest and operator flows without any Pod physically attached. See Deployment View.