What Kind Of LED Matrix Does Your Vodka Come With?

Medea Vodka comes with a bottle that includes a blue scrolling LED Marquee. OK, great? It’s an interesting marketing ploy but kind of a waste don’t you think? Friends, it’s up to us to repurpose this  hardware. It can’t be that difficult to hack into the programmable display and make it do your bidding. Our friend Google tells us that you can get your hands on this 750 milliliter bottle for about $40. That’s around $25 more than a passable grade of Vodka sells for, a mere pittance for the challenge of cracking open the hardware for fun and profit. Don’t forget to document your work and tip us off once you’ve accomplished something. See Medea’s programming instructional video after the break. Oh yeah, remember to hack first and drink later… cheap soldering irons get hot!

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/7817799]

[Thanks LoopyMind via Idealize]

40 thoughts on “What Kind Of LED Matrix Does Your Vodka Come With?

  1. step 1: sample the vodka to ensure consistency… …step 4: sample the vodka again to gain confidence in your hacking abilities… … step 6: sample the vodka… … step 12: vodka…

  2. Some ideas:

    1) Temperature gauge! Add a thermometer on the inside and measure the temperature of the vodka.

    2) Measure contents remaining, Print out % of bottle left

    3) Create a drinking game out of this!

  3. When I code for fun, I like to drink, so this could be a great project. A little pricey for an led matrix I think, unless this is really good vodka.
    The funny thing for me about drinking while coding, I often times write stuff that works great, but it makes no sense to me the next day. It ends up that when I want to modify the code I usually have to scrap it and start fresh. The sober code is usually a lot bigger but at least I know what’s going on. Hopefully I can get a job working @ home someday ;-)

    P.S. I’m drinking right now, but I’m from Wisconsin so it’s ok.

  4. Every time some commenter on HaD complains about the widespread use of Arduino… take a shot!

    Once there’s no more flammable liquid in the bottle it’s time to pick up the iron (shouldn’t take more than a day or so..).

  5. I bet someone will think WOW what a great idea lets slap an old ardunio on that bad boy…after reading HaD for awhile now and I still have no idea what it is nor do I care…

  6. This might be a real deal! about $25 for a blue led matrix. Multiply the top with the side row of leds then take that number and multiply the price of what one of those leds cost (probably about $1 each) I counted from the topic pic a 17×5 matrix = 8 fucking 5 leds. $85 vs $25 plus another $25 to get plastered! FUCK YEAH!

  7. Damn his english, he should have drank loads more vodka before making these comments in this movie haha

    i can tell for sure the guy is dutch from his way of speaking english, and i would have left my teacher with an hartattack if i spoke this way

    (and yet people may find errors in my english, but at least i dont sound silly

  8. That flick is 100% absurd – I love it! :D A couple in a romantic setting, POURING DOWN VODKA and PROGRAMMING ELECTRIC COLLARS with CHOPIN playing in the background ..!

    “Pchrez the entaah baton ant zen..”

  9. It’s a PIC16F628A with 4 x 74HC595 8-Bit Serial to Serial/Parallel ICs and a ATMEL AT24C16AN EEPROM. The leds are 120 ( 5 x24 ) SMD blue leds 1mmx2mm in size on a flexible film dual layer PCB. There are two CR2032 (not soldered so they can be replaced) at each end of the film (right behind the buttons) that fit into a deeper slot on the bottle.

    The whole thing is held in place by a transparent silicone sleeve and a smaller plastic frame to distribute the pressure on the PCB.

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