Over-Engineered Bottle Opener Takes The Drudgery Out Of Drinking

Some projects take but a single glance for you to know what inspired them in the first place. For this over-engineered robotic bottle opener, the obvious influence was a combination of abundant free time and beer. Plenty of beer.

Of course there are many ways to pop the top on a tall cold one, depending on the occasion. [Matt McCoy] and his cohorts selected the “high-impulse” method, which when not performed by a robot is often accomplished by resting the edge of the cap on a countertop and slapping the bottle down with the palm of one’s hand. This magnificently pointless machine does the same thing, except with style.

The bottle is placed in a cradle which grips it, gently but firmly, and presents it to the opening mechanism in a wholly unnecessary motion-control ballet. Once in place, a lead screw moves a carriage down, simultaneously storing potential energy in a bundle of elastic surgical tubing while tripping a pawl on the edge of the cap. A lever trips at the bottom of the carriage’s travel, sending the pawl flying upward to liberate the libation, giving the robot a well-deserved and sudsy showers. Behold the wonderful interplay of 190 custom parts — and beer — in the video below.

Hats off to [Matt] et al for their tireless efforts on behalf of beleaguered beer-openers everywhere. This seems like the perfect accessory to go along with a game of mind-controlled beer pong.

15 thoughts on “Over-Engineered Bottle Opener Takes The Drudgery Out Of Drinking

    1. I agree. If engineering is the art of thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution, then “overengineering” would mean thinking about it too much, and doing a better job than is necessary. This doesn’t appear to be better than necessary.

    1. Indeed, though mostly I think its just a better grip on the bottle so it stays square. Its too free to rotate with the clamping arms as they are.

      If you clamp it at an angle over the Pint glass/tankard/Drinking horn then most of any spill will be caught and it can follow up by pouring it for you!

  1. Wondering if a better result could be achieved by using one of those wall mounted beer openers. If the beer were place in a canted cradle with a pivot on a track the inserted the head into the opener, then continued to pull the holder laterally (with sufficient vertical give), it would probably be possible to automate a beer opener with a single stepper motor…then again, that kinda misses the point of the whole project.

  2. Needs better control around the neck of the bottle. The use of the rubber bands is clever, but holding it at the bottom results in a non-insignificant amount of beer on sensitive electronics.

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