Arduino Beer Keyboard
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.
November 22nd, 2012 at 03:02:39
I love the unique idea, why don’t you try soda keyboards? For people who are not into drinking? Or something cute or classy to look at?
November 22nd, 2012 at 11:41:01
I don’t commonly comment but I gotta admit regards for the post on this perfect one :D.
November 28th, 2012 at 01:06:23
raspberry pi usb specification