The Bartender
Made by terence-grover / Art / Home Automation / Robotics
About the project
A voice-controlled bartending robot serving drinks in a visually pleasing way.
Project info
Difficulty: Moderate
Platforms: Everything ESP, Raspberry Pi
Estimated time: 2 weeks
License: GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL3+)
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Story
This project came from the curiosity of automating procedural tasks done by humans. How hard can pouring different liquids in glass be? Well it turns out it's not that complicated with a few tubes, a few pumps and the right organisation. But that would be boring. So I decided to create a project that would combine mechanical action with coding to empty the liquids into a glass in the most theatrical way i could think of. Bottle rotating around a central axis.
This led to me playing with solenoid valves to find out how i wanted them to unload, discovering the vacuum effect that happens in bottles when they unload. Then, I needed to make those valves start their unloading with the presence of a glass so originally, I went for a proximity sensor which then evolved into a weight sensor (kind of like a Pokemon).
But the hardest was still to come. The mechanical action and its wireless triggering. For this, I decided on an ESP32 since it has onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and enough ports to control 6 relays. I opted for simple network calls by pairing each relay to an endpoint.
For the mechanical action, I had to secure the motor in place at the foot of the base and create some sort of coupling for the top rotating part. The top rotating part is a steel round empty tubing forced through a ball bearing with the ball bearing itself attached to the base. I then stuffed a wooden round tube in the metal tubing all the way down to the motor and coupled it with an hexagonal screw piece.
Finally, I coded the API calls to Whisper and chat GPT to transform my voice into text and extract the cocktail recipe from the demand of the user. And recorded some voice acting lines to make the robot respond to the user (in Harry Styles' voice cause why not)
I then connected all the bottles to the rotating top piece and closed them with the solenoid valves. With the code in place it was time for a celebration :)
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