Don’t Worry Occifer, There Is No Blood In My Alcohol!

[Daniel] wrote up a quick tutorial on interfacing with the MQ-3, or better known Breathalyzer from SparkFun with Arduino. While we would have used perhaps an op-amp/comparator based system and kept it in a much smaller package, the idea was so quick and simple and enjoyable we hoped an article might keep some hackers from drinking and driving.

[Thanks CletustheYokel for pointing out our silly category mistake.]

28 thoughts on “Don’t Worry Occifer, There Is No Blood In My Alcohol!

  1. in response to the first poster, there have been times when I felt fine after having spent a night out having drinks. A couple of those times I had the opportunity to check my BAC, I took that opportunity, because it’s better to be safe than sorry. I’ve even had times I thought I was too drunk, but then had a breathalyzer tell me I was perfectly legal. I still didn’t drive though. Heck, I had trouble walking

  2. The only thing on the sensor datasheet that indicates how long you need to feed the 750 mW heater (5V across 33 ohms) to get it into a proper operating state is “preheat time — over 24 hour.” That isn’t encouraging from a portable or low-power perspective.

  3. Maybe a breathalyzer combined with a flicker fusion test would be more effective.
    You can be unsafe to drive with a BAC of 0.0, if you are so tired you can’t concentrate properly.

    Combine with a mini safe in the car and this could save lives.

  4. Reminds me of when they first installed coinop breathalyzers in some local bars years ago… they actuall had the opposite intended effect because everybody was lining up to see who could blow the highest numbers ;-)

  5. This would actually be very useful in my honest opinion. Imagine you’re throwing a party, and you don’t want people driving home drunk and as you all might know, people are likely to be stubborn about wanting to drive what with conflicted judgment via intoxication. This device would allow the person throwing the party to collect keys at the door and require someone to pass the breathalyzer to get their keys back upon leaving.

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