You’d be hard pressed to find an IT back office that doesn’t have a few Cisco routers or switches laying around and collecting dust. We’d even bet there are a decent number of people reading this post right now that have a stack of them within arm’s reach. They’re the kind of thing most of us have no practical application for, but we still can’t bear to throw away. But it looks like [Sven Tantau] has found an ideal middle ground: rather than junk his Cisco Catalyst switches, he turned them into automatic bartenders.
Inspired by all those perfect little square openings on the front, [Sven] loaded each switch with a whopping 24 peristaltic pumps, one for each Ethernet port. To fit all his plumbing inside, the switches were naturally gutted to the point of being hollow shells of their former selves, although he does mention that their original power supplies proved useful for keeping two dozen power-hungry motors well fed.
The motors are connected to banks of relays, which in turn are thrown by an ESP32 and an Arduino Nano. [Sven] explains that he wasn’t sure if the ESP32 could fire off the relays with its 3 V output, so he decided to just use an Arduino which he already knew could handle the task. The two microcontrollers work in conjunction, with a web interface on the ESP32 ultimately sending I2C commands to the Arduino when it’s time to get the pumps spinning.
[Sven] mentions his robotic bartenders were a hit at the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp, where we know for a fact the computer-controlled alcohol was flowing freely. Of course, if you don’t intend on carrying your barbot around to hacker camps, you can afford to make it look a bit swankier.
I like the idea, yet i wouldn’t trust those pumps with stuff that I’m supposed to to drink.
Hi, thanks!
Those are peristaltic pumps, the internals do not touch the liquid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peristaltic_pump
The silicone tubes I use are ‘food grade’ and certified to run 80% alcohol through them.
I also had a strong desire to not kill my friends. :)
Thanks buddy! Like thatb you’re not trying to poison us ;
so… you don’t understand how peristaltic pumps work… you should look them up.
Thought they might have controlled it by enable/disable ports with voltage detection of the LEDs with loopback jacks used to see lots of projects in 2003 use that method to get 24 or 48 gpio easily with old equipment. Then you could really put that Cisco cert. to some use.
Love the idea!
For this project the space inside the switches is too tiny.
But this is something I will keep in mind.
Mixing his two favorite hobbies?
It’s only a matter of time before there is virtual service that does this on AWS :)
Love it!!!!
I currently have 50% of the parts to build one myself, but the Cisco chassis is really innovative. How would you feed in the drinks though?
Thanks! :)
You can plug in extension tubes. Those you put into the bottles.
Check the bottom of the website to see some pictures with tubing in action.
Would love to see it modeled in Packet Tracer LOL