1575 Bottles Of Beer On The (LED) Wall

June 3, 2016 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Say hello to my little friend, lovingly named Flaschen Taschen by the members of Noisebridge in San Francisco. It is a testament to their determination to ~~drink Corona beer~~ get more members involved in building big displays each year for the Bay Area Maker Faire. I pulled aside a couple of the builders for an interview despite their very busy booth. When you have a huge full-color display standing nine feet tall and ten feet wide it’s no surprise the booth was packed with people.

Check out the video and then join me after the break for more specifics on how they pulled this off.

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Beautiful Kegerator, Built The Hard Way

May 19, 2016 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

[Luke] brews his own beer. And like all beer brewers, he discovered that the worst part of homebrewing is cleaning out all the bottles. Time for a kegging system! And that means, time for a kegerator to keep the brew cold.

Normal kegerators are just a few holes drilled in an appropriate refrigerator. Most fridges have a step in the back where the compressor lives, which makes kegs an awkward fit, so [Luke] decided to build his own refrigerator.

He used beautiful wood and plenty of insulation. He failed, though, because he succumbed to the lure of the Peltier cooler. If there’s one problem with Peltier projects, it’s building first and looking up the specs second. They never have enough cool-juice. To quote [Luke]:

“… a comment I had seen somewhere on the Internet began to sink in: all projects involving peltier devices ultimately end in disappointment.“

(Bolding and italics from the original.) But at least he learned about defrosting, and he had a nice wood-paneled fridge-box in the basement.

Rather than give up, he found a suitable donor fridge, ripped out its guts, and transplanted them into his homemade box. A beautiful tap head sitting on top completes the look. And of course, there’s an ESP8266 inside logging the temperature and controlling the compressor, with all the data pushed out over WiFi. Try doing that with your ~~Faraday Cage~~ metal fridge!

We’ve seen kegerator builds before. Some of our favorites include this one that has a motorized retracting tap tower, and one that’s built into the walls of the house.

Hack Corporate Overlords For Single Button Beer Delivery

April 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 9 Comments

[Brody Berson] is at it again, but this time he’s hacked the services floating in the aether around him to give him beer on demand. Finally the future we’ve been waiting for.

This hack is not as hacky as his first one, which, at the push of a button, could summon a bad driver straight to his house who would then give him pizza. The first one was done with a modified version of a button used to summon paper towels; because there’s nothing like needing paper towels RIGHT NOW, and then pushing a button to get them a few days later.

Apparently Amazon saw how practically no one was pushing the dish detergent button, but a lot of people were making scary mailboxes and magic pizza apps after ruthlessly scratching the branding off. So they shrugged and decided to sell the buttons as the newly branded (these get more hilarious when you don’t use the acronyms) Amazon, Amazon Web Services Internet of Things Button. Now your button can die along with the internet because Amazon is hosting your Raspberry Pi for a small fee, neat.

Anyway, [Brody] did some research on the best beer delivery services in his area, and went with one called Drizzly because they had a nice API. After integrating this system with Amazon’s, he can now push a button and minutes later, after subtracting some currencies from his account, a bad driver will show up and hand him beer.

In Soviet Russia, Drink Serves You

November 17, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

There’s just something about having an automatic bartending machine that screams “we’re in the future now” — and it’s a future we approve of. This project is called the Alkomat (Google Translate), and it’s a handy little machine capable of mixing drinks for five people at a time.

Inspired by the RumBot, [Strn] wanted to practice his hand at hardware integration and product development from idea to creation — and just looking at some of the photos of this, he did a damn good job.

On the inside of Alkomat is a recycled inkjet XY carriage which can index on each of the five drinks. A series of four tubes feed up to peristaltic pumps that provide alcohol from the bar rack. Once he had the hardware sorted out and operational, he set out to make the machine look as presentable as possible. Using a mixture of counter-tops and laminated wood panels from furniture, he’s boxed up the whole thing and made it look like something you might actually be able to buy from a store — maybe IKEA?

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Mini Fridge Turned Gameboy Puts Hot Games On Ice

September 3, 2015 by Kevin Dady 12 Comments

The plain old white mini fridge, a staple of many dorm rooms could use a little decoration. The resemblance to a classic gameboy is not that hard to imagine with some novelty stickers, but [ModPurist] went the extra mile with his Cold Boy.

Making a mini fridge into a playable gameboy involves taking apart the door, once in a Raspberry Pi 2 is fitted in along with a second hand “square screen” LCD. The front of the door is cut for some custom wooden buttons, which are connected to tactile switches. Once everything is fit and finished the door is reassembled, so the fridge can resume its normal life keeping soda and hot dogs good and cold. [ModPurist] covered the progression of the hack in his work log.

While it’s a little low to the ground, it should be a hit at college parties where being on the floor is not unusual. Join us after the break for a demonstration video and get your game on. It is, of course, missing one thing. There needs to be some type of latch inside to secure the beverages until the Konami code is entered.

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RIP: HitchBot

August 3, 2015 by Elliot Williams 59 Comments

Equal parts art project and social media experiment, with a dash of backyard hackery “robotics” thrown in for good measure, hitchBot was an experiment in the kindness of strangers. That is, the kindness of strangers toward a beer bucket filled with a bunch of electronics with a cute LED smiley face.

The experiment came to a tragic end (vandalism, naturally) in Philadelphia PA, after travelling a month across Canada, ten days in Germany, and yet another month across the Netherlands. It survived two weeks in the USA, which is more than the cynics would have guessed, but a few Grand Canyons short of the American Dream.

Professors [David Smith] and [Frauke Zeller] built hitchBot to see how far cuteness and social media buzz could go. [Smith], a former hitchhiker himself, also wanted hitchBot to be a commentary on how society’s attitudes toward hitching and public trust have changed since the 70s. Would people would pick it up on the side of the street, plug it in to their own cigarette lighters, and maybe even take it to a baseball game? Judging by hitchBot’s Twitter feed, the answer was yes. And for that, little bucket, we salute you!

But this is Hackaday, and we don’t pull punches, even for the recently deceased. It’s not clear how much “bot” there was in hitchBot. It looks like it had a GPS, batteries, and a solar cell. We can’t tell if it took its own pictures, but the photos on Twitter seem to be from another perspective. It had enough brains inside to read out Wikipedia entries and do some rudimentary voice recognition tasks, so it was a step up from Tweenbots but was still reassuringly non-Terminator.

Instead, hitchBot had more digital marketing mavens and social media savants on its payroll than [Miley Cyrus] and got tons of press coverage, which seems to have been part of the point from the very start. And by writing this blog post, we’re playing right into [Smith] and [Zeller]’s plan. If you make a robot / art project cute enough to win the hearts of many, they might just rebuild it. [Margaret Atwood] has even suggested on Twitter that people might crowdfund-up a hitchBot 2.0.

Our suggestion? Open-source the build plans, and let thousands of hitchBots take its place.

Overengineering Beer Pong

April 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

If there’s one game that deserves to be overengineered with hundreds of LEDs, sensors, and electronic modules, it’s beer pong. [Jeff] has created the most ostentatious beer pong table we’ve ever seen. It’s just shy of playing beer pong on a single gigantic LED display, and boy, does it look good.

The table includes a 32×12 grid of LEDs in the center of the table, with 10 pods for Solo cups at each end of the table. These pods have 20 RGB LEDs each and infrared sensors that react to a cup being placed on them. The outer edge of the table has 12 LED rings for spectators, giving this beer pong table 1122 total LEDs on 608 individual channels.

With that many LEDs, how to drive all of them becomes very important. There’s a very large custom board in this table with a PIC24 microcontroller, TLC5955 PWM drivers, and enough IDC headers to seriously reconsider using IDC headers.

Put enough LEDs on something and it’s bound to be cool, but [Jeff] is taking this several steps further with some interesting features. There’s a Bluetooth module for controlling the table with a phone, a VU meter to give the table some audio-based visualizations, and air baths for cleaning the balls; drop a ball down the ‘in’ hole, and it pops out the ‘out’ hole, good as new. If you’ve ever wondered how much effort can go into building a beer pong table, there you go. Video below.

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