Want some fancy ice for your next cocktail party? You can try to find spherical ice-cube trays but you won’t get the kind of results seen here. It turns out the trick to this isn’t how you freeze the water, it’s how you melt the ice.

[Brendan O'Connor] started this project after seeing an ice mold that could make beautiful shapes rather than just cubes. But the price tag was $1400. If he could make his own at a hackerspace we’d bet that would pay his membership for an entire year!

The concept is pretty simple. The video after the break shows the mold he was trying to recreate. It’s two hunks of metal with a shape milled into them. The mold is pre-heated, then an oversized hunk of ice is placed between the blocks. The heat melts away the parts you don’t want, and leaves a perfectly shaped ice orb in between. Gravity is responsible for pulling the mold halves together as they slide along some machined rods.

With a big hunk of scrap aluminum he milled two halves of a sphere. They can be sufficiently heated if held under running water, and a some leftover printer rails keep the two parts aligned as the ice orb is formed. Now [Brendan] just needs to work on his method of creating a crystal-clear ice block as a starter and he’ll have achieved total win.

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For those living in a magical land of candy, with orange-faced helpers to do their bidding, the ability to taste your words is nothing new. But for the rest of us, the ability to taste what you type in cocktail form is a novelty. [Morskoiboy] took some back-of-the-envelope ideas and made them into a real device that uses syringes as keys, and facilitates the injection of twenty-six different flavorings into a baseline liquid. He figures that you can make each letter as creative as you want to, like representing different alcohols with a letter (T for tequila) or matching them to colors (R for red). Check out the video after the break to see an ‘Any Word’ cocktail being mixed.

This setup is entirely mechanical, and makes us wonder if [Morskoiboy] works in the medical equipment design industry. Each letter for the keyboard is affixed to the plunger on a syringe. When depressed, they cause the liquid in an external vessel (not seen above) to travel through tubing until it fills the proper cavities on a 15-segment display to match the letter pressed. From there the additive is flushed out by the gravity-fed base liquid into the drinking glass. We can’t imagine the time that went into designing all of the plumbing!

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[John Creswell] built a heck of an automatic bartender in a kitchen island. The image on the left shows a top-down view of the inside of the cabinet. There’s a mini-fridge where the liquids are stored, and around the perimeter of the cabinet [John] mounted sixteen pumps to get the beverage up into your cup. Drinks are dispensed from the lighted serving fixture on the right by selecting your preferred cocktail from a computerized menu. According to his writeup the project was finished about five years ago, making us wonder if he’s tackled any upgrades such as adding support for smartphones.

[Thanks Zack]

[Qdot] came up with a simple way to dosing out liquids to use in his Bartris project. As you can see above, flexible tubing is connected to some inverted bottles that house the liquid. A chopstick is attached to a board on one end, and via string to a servo on the other. When the servo turns it pulls the chopstick tight against the board, cutting off the flow of liquid through the tubing. This isn’t as elegant as the system the Bar2D2 uses but it’s a heck of a lot less expensive.

You can check out some of the build pictures in his Flickr pool. He’s included this concept in a project he calls Adult Mario. Watch the video after the break but the quick and dirty is that the more coins you score in Super Mario Brothers, the more beverage is rationed out into your cup. Ah, human lab rats, is there nothing they won’t do for booze?

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We couldn’t make Roboexotica in Vienna, Austria this year (check out last year’s coverage), so we asked [Bre Pettis] to act as our liaison.

Last night was the opening party of Roboexotica, the worldwide gathering of cocktail robots. It was a blast! Pictured above is Robovox, a 40 foot high robot that you can text message to and it will say what you text to it! Read the rest of this entry »

After the break are some of our favorite bits of machinery from Roboexotica so far.

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Here is a special edition Hackit in honor of Roboexotica. Ever since making the decision to attend Roboexotica we’ve been speculating on the type of machines we’d like to see at such an event. Here are a handful of ideas:

Iceware via rapid prototyping: As we type this post, [Bre] is in the background attempting to build a RepRap style rapid prototyping machine that will construct shot glasses on demand. We were thinking it would be neat to cut beverage glasses out of blocks of ice using a milling machine, but why stick with normal milling equipment? It’s ice right; you could be doing something stupid like using a butane torch for your working tool. We then began to wonder “Has anyone built an ice based rapid prototyping machine?” You could just deposit water on a frozen surface to create your glassware. A group at the University of Missouri has been investigating “rapid freeze prototyping“. Since they’re using water, they only have to create the frozen shell of the part and then fill in the empty cavity with water to create a solid.

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Tonight marks the kickoff of Roboexotica in Vienna. It’s the world’s leading festival for cocktail robotics. The event aims to explore the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the increasing integration of technological innovations into human lives. It also explores the explosion of radical hedonism in man-machine interaction.

…or it’s just an excuse for a bunch of smart people to get together, build robots, and drink.

The word ‘robotics’ seems to always imply ‘efficiency’, but that’s definitely a no-no at Roboexotica. Fine tuned manufacturer grade cocktail production is not the goal; personality, charm, character, all of these qualities are important in machinery destined for Roboexotica. You can already see some photos from the event setup on Flickr and we’ll be bringing you more posts on the individual machines as we get more information/drinks.