High Rise Automated Alcohol Delivery System

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It all started the day Bernie left.   In clearing out his cube, he found an AB PicoLogix controller he had received from a training class at some point in his career and gave it to myself and my friend Rob who was interning with us at the time (I had just gotten a full time job maybe a year prior).  We weren't sure what to do with it at the time, but it wasn't long before Rob had a stroke of brilliance.   "Why not build an automated beer bong out of it?" he exclaimed one day.  Being fresh out of college (or still in it in Rob's case), the concept of a beer bong was admittedly probably something that was taking up too much space in our collective brains.

For those not familiar with the concept, a beer bong is generally a funnel with a maybe two foot tube attached.  The concept is that by bending the tube upwards, one can load the funnel and half of the tube with a full can of beer.  The user then gets down low, puts the non-funnel end of the tube to their lips and by raising the funnel and bringing gravity to bear, can force large quantities of beer rapidly down ones throat. Is this concept and activity leading to the degradation of American society? Perhaps.  But is it an engineer's duty in life to take an existing idea and make it better? Absolutely.  And so we decided to take this immature idea to new heights, literally.

Our concept of the automated beer bong was one that grew rapidly as we started to get into it.  Originally the idea was to automate some valves so that we could lengthen the tube and perform a larger drop.  This began to manifest itself in a 3 story design that could be setup at the top of my townhouse (which is on the second floor) and the user could be on the ground outside of the basement.

As we moved into the programming phase, we decided to add more and more functionality.  I should also point out how the lack of requirements here led to some major scope creep.  First we decided that two people should be able to share in this joy simultaneously.  I mean, what's the fun of taking a 3 story beer bong when you don't have someone next to you that you can race in such an endeavor. So we created 2 tracks tied to a single start button so they would start at the same time.  We wanted the tracks to be selectable, so I could choose to race my friend or I could choose to go solo.  If I picked the later, I didn't want beer to come pouring down the tube that had no one waiting for it at the other end and spill all over the ground.  We then came up with the brilliant idea that we would want to control the amount of beer being delivered. Perhaps I'd only want a full beer or maybe I wanted to go crazy and try multiple beers.  So we decided to control the amount of beer being delivered, making it selectable between one and six beers in half beer increments.  Finally, we had to make sure that we keep the beer bong clean and functioning and to that end we needed a CIP (Clean in Place) mode that allowed the valves to stay full open so we could flush the lines with water and cleaning solution as needed.

Fabrication went quickly, although it was certainly not up to any NEC, UL or other code. In fact, in some ways it was fairly unsafe. Some of the different buttons and switches we mounted on a piece of plexiglass, but it was initially designed to be something that would be more of a wall-mount, such to say there was no back or enclosure around the terminal ends for those components.  In addition, we used those style terminal blocks that are DIN-rail mounted and open on one side (where you are supposed to use an end cap) except we had no end piece and so one side was completely exposed. In the end we threw a blanket over the whole thing and told people not to go near it (kind of like an SOP).  We did, fortunately realize one potential safety issue ahead of time and took action to improve the receiving end of the beer bong.  We recognized that the downward rush of beer was going to push a fair amount of air initially into the receiver's mouth before the beer shows up. To mitigate this we put a T-connector at the end with a one foot length of tubing sticking up to allow the air to release and to not be forced into the person's throat.

With our crude implementation complete, we set off to run some tests.  Needless to say, we were pretty excited about testing it out.  We had to dial in the beer measurement (based off of timers and average time to get a fixed amount of beer out) and adjust the length of the air relief tube at the bottom, but overall it ran pretty well out of the gate.  This was pretty fortunate since we were doing this initial testing about 30 minutes prior to the production startup which just happened to coincide with an unveiling party. In the end everyone had a good time and no one got electrocuted, although to be fair we didn't push the full design capability of delivering 5 or 6 beers at a single time.

I apologize for not having any actual pictures of the beer bong in action. For some reason, we were counseled by our lawyer-like conscious' at the time that it would be better if no photographic evidence existed, although now I wish we had it for posterity sake. It still makes for a fine story without any pictures though, so we'll make do.

So what kind of personal engineering adventures have you experienced?  Do you have any experiences where you have used automation around the house, perhaps getting a bit too involved or overly complicated?  We'd love to hear some of those stories.