A Really Garbage Project

No matter who you are,  you produce garbage of some kind or another. Two students decided they wanted to create a smart garbage can that could alert them when the can is full or even when it is stinky.

We will go on on the record: we didn’t know that an alcohol sensor could tell if your garbage is stinky, so if that works, that’s a new one on us. However, it makes a certain kind of sense because garbage ferments. We thought garbage smelled because of hydrogen sulfide and methane.

Trash cans have a tough life, so if you really want to duplicate this, you’ll probably want to mount things a bit more securely. The software, however, runs everything through a cloud service and from there can use Blynk for a phone app and IFTTT to ship things to a spreadsheet, should you care to track your garbage history statistics.

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Buzzed Buzzer Gives You A Breathalyzer Test While Ringing In The New Year

We’re not sure if there’s enough time to get a parts order delivered, but no geeky New Year’s party will be complete without a party buzzer that doubles as a Breathalyzer. The Buzzed Buzzer hides all of the necessary bits inside of a paper and plastic party favor. We guess it only buzzes if you’re over the limit? Actually that’s not the case at all. The accuracy of the sensor used in the project really just measures the presence of alcohol and can’t quantify BAC.

A Teensy 2.0 microcontroller board drives the project. Powered by a Lithium cell, it monitors an MQ-3 Alcohol gas sensor and drives a buzzer. The components are just small enough to be hidden by the cone of the party buzzer. You can see a demonstration of this in the short clip after the jump.

This is a fun project, but we’re still big fans of getting the crowd involved with this large LED meter which is hooked up to the same style of alcohol sensor.

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Bluetooth Enabled Breathalyzer

[Al] at Open Gadgets just put the finishing touches on his Android breathalyzer. It’s the perfect thing to install on ex-girlfriends’ phones to prevent 2 a.m. drunk dialing.

The project started off as a talking breathalyzer connected to a computer that tweeted your BAC, gave weather and stock readouts, and functioned as a photo booth. Since the first reveal of his project, [Al] moved from the desktop world to the mobile domain.

The breathalyzer itself is contained entirely in an Altoids tin. The build is based on the IOIO board that recently got support for Bluetooth. An alcohol sensor in the project measures the alcohol content of the surrounding atmosphere and reports this back to a phone over Bluetooth. There’s no word if the Android version of [Al]’s breathalyzer has the Twitter and photo booth functions, they would be relatively easy to add.

While a wirelesss, tweeting breathalyzer lends itself to a competition for a high score, [Al]’s project could have a few very good implantation; a DIY auto ignition interlock would be a very useful device for some people. Check out the videos of [Al]’s builds after the break.

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Inaccurate Breathalyzer Is Still Quite Nice

Sure, [Hunter Scott’s] Breathalyzer can only differentiate between hammer and sober, but look how nice it came out. He’s using an MQ-3 alcohol sensor which, from previous projects, we know is very difficult to accurately calibrate. But if you want to monkey around with embedded systems you’ve got to have a goal. [Hunter] chose a gorgeous aluminum project enclosure, adding a big LCD display to the to the lit. The switch on the bottom selects between on, off, and charging modes. He’s using a USB charger from Adafruit to top off the lithium battery inside. Everything runs on 3.3V with the exception of the sensor which gets its 5V supply from a boost converter. An Arduino is the brains that pulls everything together.

See [Hunter’s] video description of the project embedded after the break.

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