alcohol

38 Articles

Class Up Your Next Party With The Drink Making Unit 2.0

April 4, 2011 by 7 Comments

drink_making_unit_20

The crew over at [Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories] has been hard at work preparing for the Barbot 2011 cocktail robotic exhibition. This year, they are packing some serious drinking fun with the Drink Making Unit 2.0. The predictably named follow-up to last year’s wildly popular Drink Making Unit doubles the mixing capability with six, rather than three fluids, and provides a visually stimulating drink mixing experience.

While they are similarly named, the new unit has been completely redesigned since last year. No longer are they relying on breast pumps to move the alcohol along. Instead, they are using compressed air to dispense fluids from wash bottles which were constructed from laboratory beakers. The fluids are measured in specially altered graduated cylinders that are designed to tip over and release their contents when the appropriate amount of alcohol has been poured. These cylinders are designed to mimic the movement of Japanese garden fixtures called “deer chasers”, tipping back and forth solely powered by the ingress and egress of liquid.

The dispenser’s control panel houses an ATmega164, which orchestrates the entire operation. It interfaces with the LED driver boards that make up the display via SPI. The micro controller is also tasked with monitoring when the graduated cylinders tip their libations into the dispensing funnel, which is done using IR LEDs and photogates.

It’s a great looking machine, and while there isn’t any drink mixing video as of yet, we can’t wait to see it in action.

Your Very Own Cloud Chamber

January 23, 2011 by 28 Comments

 

[Kenneth] and [Jeff] spent a weekend building a cloud chamber. This is a detection device for radiation particles that are constantly bombarding the earth. It works by creating an environment of supersaturated alcohol vapor which condenses when struck by a particle travelling through the container, leaving a wispy trail behind. This was done on the cheap, using isopropyl alcohol and dry ice. They already had a beaker, and after a few tries figured out that the dry ice worked best when serving as a bed for the flask. A black piece of paper was added inside the base of the container to help raise the contrast when looking for condensate. They experimented with a couple of different methods for warming the alcohol, including an immersion heater built from power resistors.

There’s a video explaining the apparatus which we’ve embedded after the break. It’s a bit hard to see evidence of particle travel in the video but that’s all the more reason you should give this a try yourself.

Continue reading “Your Very Own Cloud Chamber” →

Perfect Shots Every Time

December 28, 2010 by 23 Comments

A shot is a shot right? Well, not really. Usually we see a sloppy shot poured of a single type of alcohol and, depending on our current standing with the bartender, may or may not be full to the brim.  The Pousse-Cafe makes an art out of your drinks by perfectly layering several liqueurs. Not only will it measure them out perfectly, but it is voice controlled as well. There are 3 liqueurs to choose from, as they were going for a specific, visually appealing drink (otherwise, why bother?). Judging from the pictures it looks like it’s using an arduino in conjunction with a laptop for control.

You can see a video of it in action after the break.

[via Gizmodo]

Continue reading “Perfect Shots Every Time” →

Wine Cask Sensor Suite

August 4, 2010 by 15 Comments

As part of his Master’s dissertation [Salvador Faria] built a sensor suite for wine monitoring. He needed to develop a method of tracking data inside the wine cask during the vinification process. What he came up with eclipses the wine cellar temperature monitors we’ve seen before.

He picked up pH, temperature, carbon dioxide, alcohol, and relative humidity sensors from familiar vendors like Seeed, Parallax, and SparkFun. His original idea was to develop a floating probe that housed the entire package but he had quite a bit of trouble getting everything inside and maintaining buoyancy. The solution was a two-part probe; the stationary portion seen mounted on top of the cask houses the microcontroller, RF 433 MHz transmitter, and the gas sensors. Tethered to that is a floating probe that measures pH and temperature. Data is sent over radio frequency to an HTTP POST server every minute.

Don’t Worry Occifer, There Is No Blood In My Alcohol!

March 7, 2010 by 28 Comments

[Daniel] wrote up a quick tutorial on interfacing with the MQ-3, or better known Breathalyzer from SparkFun with Arduino. While we would have used perhaps an op-amp/comparator based system and kept it in a much smaller package, the idea was so quick and simple and enjoyable we hoped an article might keep some hackers from drinking and driving.

[Thanks CletustheYokel for pointing out our silly category mistake.]

Drink Making Unit

February 17, 2010 by 35 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC9l1jO7Lyc]

3 breast pumps, a Meggy jr RGB (slightly modified) and copious amounts of alcohol. This sounds like a typical weekend at HAD headquarters, but it is in fact the parts list for the Drink Making Unit by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Created for the upcoming Barbot 2010 event, this unit is a cocktail mixer. Load 3 liquids in, program the Meggy and you can push a button to dispense. We are pleased to see how much they modified off the shelf components to make this happen. Yes, there could be major improvements like mixing, more liquid reservoirs, and a better cooling system, but we think this thing is pretty slick.

Nunk On Droise

December 6, 2009 by 23 Comments

Nunk on Droise is an art installation where noise is made depending on how drunk you are. In a configuration that could be called a cthoilet, the sensors shown above are alcohol sensors. Though we initially thought this would be testing urine, the description states that it tests the breath of the participant. Unfortunately there aren’t any schematics or code, though you can see how it is all assembled from the flickr pool. You can also see a video demonstration of the prototype.