The Internet of Booze: Robo-Bartender Serves Five Drinks Simultaneously, Then Offers a Toast

Because who has time to mix drinks - and text? JL

Sean Gallagher reports in ars technica:

The perfect robotic assistant for the holidays: a Wi-Fi-connected bartending machine that mixes up to five drinks at a time.
A Russian hardware hacker has created the perfect robotic assistant for the holidays: a Wi-Fi-connected bartending machine that mixes up to five drinks at a time. The creator, who goes by the handle Strn on the Russian tech site Geektimes.ru, has dubbed his machine the Alkomat.
Inspired by the Rumbot, an Arduino-based mixed drink dispenser, the Alkomat is built on the chassis of an old inkjet printer, using the printer carriage and paper feed motors to control the movement of its nozzle. The system is powered by a Microchip PIC microcontroller connected to a Sparkfun ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. Pumps that suck liquids from the bottles hooked up to the Alkomat's nozzle system are controlled by a Texas Instruments ULN2003-based motor driver.
The drinks to be made from the Alkomat's selection (limited by its support for only four bottles of booze) can be selected five at a time from a web page running on the Sparkfun's built-in HTTP server. There's also an OLED display with a set of buttons that can be used to activate the machine. Strn used a 3D printer to create a front display for the Alkomat and built a cabinet from furniture parts designed using a CAD-CAM program.
A tray made from a recycled bit of countertop has recessed positions for the drink glasses Strn selected. Photosensors embedded in each slot detect when the glasses are present, and Alkomat automatically starts once the right number of glasses has been placed in position. A recycled CD tray motor is used to move the tray into position and eject the finished drinks. And while it creates the selected beverages, Alkomat's built-in MP3 encoder plays a little music, offering up a musical or voice message "toast" when it has completed its mission.

Strn wrote that his next step is a better user interface to replace the somewhat limited webpage interface. "Now mastering Android, and I plan to write an Alkomat app," he said.