Planet Arduino

This time Arduino for drinks, always from Romania.

Do you know what you get if you combine Facebook, Twitter, Arduino, Raspberry PI and alcohol ? Well, you get the Social Drink Machine and a lot of really happy people at HowToWeb Bucharest.
The Social Drink Machine involves a fully enabled robotic bar which prepares your dream cocktail, a Facebook application which you use to order the drink and also a Twitter bot as an alternative ordering method.

In order to “drink with Facebook”, all you have to do is to scan the QR code displayed next to the machine with your mobile phone. It will get you to a Facebook application which enables you to choose the drink you want. Once you have decided what you want to drink, the application displays a large QR code on your mobile phone. You show this to the machine camera, and you will get your drink prepared. Actually, a robotic machine will prepare it for you. All you have to do is to place the glass, which is then moved back and forth until all of the ingredients have been mixed. And if you wanna brag about this, the application allows you to post on Facebook about the crush you just got on the cool robotic bartender.

[Robofun - Create] also made this.

Our friends from Romania send us this:

Do you know what you get if you combine 44 beer cans with an Arduino board and a Raspberry PI ? I tell you : fantastic user engagement!

It happened at Webstock, event which took place in Bucharest this month. Staropramen, one of the sponsors of the event asked us for an innovative way to offer a trip to Prague to one of the event’s guests.

So, we came up with a keyboard made out of 44 Staropramen beer cans. Each beer can was a key, and whenever someone touched it, the corresponding letter appeared on a large plasma screen (just like any regular computer keyboard).

And the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.

Behind the scene, the system is built around an Arduino board and a few capacitive controllers (just like the ones which are inside smartphones’ touch screens), connected to a Raspberry PI board which controls the plasma screen display.

Other hardware we used was the Sparkfun MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout Board (4 of them, each controlling 11 beer cans) and one Sparkfun MP3 Trigger Board which controls the sound effects.

A movie and some photos took during the event can be found on the [website]
(feel free to use them if you want, or download directly the photos as a zip archive).

[Webstock] is the biggest blogging and social media event in Romania.

[Robofun Create] is a Romanian company specialised in creating cool on-demand technology products.