Boat Brings Bathers Beverages

Chilling in the pool is great, but what a drag to have to get out to grab a cold brew. [Alister] had his eye on a commercial drink float, but the company was out of business. But 3D printing, of course, comes to the rescue in this video, also embedded below.

The payload amounts to four bottles and some snacks. Brushless thrusters allow the bartender to steer the little robot around the pool to deliver libations.

A resin overcoat allows the 3D printed material to float. After the hull and thrusters are done, the rest is pretty simple: an RC receiver and some speed controllers round it out. For festivity’s sake, the boat sports an MP3 player, a water cannon, and a remote-control flagpole.

It looked like fun to drive around a pool. It might not be seaworthy enough for a trip to the ocean, but it would probably be workable on a quiet lake. We don’t know what the service life of the little device will be, but we wonder if you couldn’t sell these to resorts for delivering things to swimmers.

We’ve seen [Alister] print boats before. We thought a hovercraft version of this would be cool until we thought about lifting heavy bottles and messing up swimmer’s hair.

15 thoughts on “Boat Brings Bathers Beverages

  1. Wonderful!

    Suggest a grating to hold the electronics/wiring above the lowest part of the hull and a pump there to get rid of any slosh. Because you know that there’s going to be splashing around this thing and what’s a pirate vessel without a bilge?

  2. Requires the laser alignment gizmo iron man’s suit had that identified the position of hands therefore arms then deployed the suit while in terminal velocity freefall…food for thought.

  3. OK, as soon as I was this I thought that it would be super cool if this were driven by a Voith Schneider drive system. They’re a cool design used by tug boats to have crazy maneuverability, if they were centrally mounted you would end up with unlimited 3dof control on the water.

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