When you venture out onto the beach for a day in the sun, you’re probably not preoccupied with remembering the specifics about your sunscreen’s SPF rating—if you even remembered to apply any. [starwisher] suffered a nasty sunburn after baking in the sunlight beyond her sunscreen’s limits. To prevent future suffering, she developed The Beach Buddy: a portable stereo and phone charger with a handy sunburn calculator to warn you the next time the sun is turning you into barbecue.
After telling the Beach Buddy your skin type and your sunscreen’s SPF rating, a UV sensor takes a reading and an Arduino does a quick calculation that determines how long until you should reapply your sunscreen. Who wants to lug around a boring warning box, though?
[starwisher] went to the trouble of crafting a truly useful all-in-one device by modifying this stereo and this charger to fit together in a sleek custom acrylic enclosure. There’s a switch to activate each function—timer, charger, stereo—a slot on the side to house your phone, and an LCD with some accompanying buttons for setting up the UV timer. You can check out a demo of all the Beach Buddy’s features in a video below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZhkwpgfkVA
[via Dangerous Prototypes]
Hey guys we should make an app where you scan the barcode of the sunscreen on your phone and then it automatically warns you when there is a danger of sunburn happening.
“a quick calculation that determines how long until you should reapply your sunscreen”
That’s not how SPF works, though. Once you’ve hit the time limit (safe unprotected exposure time * SPF multiplier) then reapplying doesn’t help – your skin has already received enough UV (from the small percentage that the sunscreen doesn’t absorb/reflect) that you need to get out of the sun.
Reapplying is only for when the sunscreen has started to be washed off, which is usually a constant time and is printed on the bottle (e.g. 4 hours or whatever).
Great project, but speaking as a beach-goer, those buttons and the switch don’t look like they’d fair too well in a sandy environment.
Make it from steel and put a cable lock on it so you can open it up and use it as a beach vault for your valuables. Just need to find something to lock it to.
Have similar idea for my next project, but unfortunately my open questions are not answered in this project. I need the whole thing to be powered by a LiPo charged via solar panel (it’s weird they have 9V battery for Arduino in there). And it needs to play music from USB and not require an external source.
NEVER… EVER… put the solar panels on the actual device…. You want to keep your batteries and equipment out of the sunlight for obvious reasons.
Comment on the sand… some beaches have rocks.. But all beaches (should) have water. So yeah maybe some rubber cover would do the trick here :)
Like the design, but the solar panel should go.