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Another Beer Please
jmichaelg writes "What do you get when you combine a glass, a PIC computer, two capacitors, a coil and a zener Diode? A wireless beer glass that signals your waiter when you need a refill. The circuit is an RFID transponder that measures the fluid level in a glass and transmits a globally unique ID coupled to the fluid level reading when queried by an antenna hidden in your table. The query provides enough power to drive the circuit so no batteries are needed. A technical paper describes the circuitry in the table and the glass." This hit the news over a year ago, but we didn't have the technical details.
Okay- this doesn't help our obesity issues at all. We're the only country with drivethroughs every 5 feet and now we are spared the exercise of raising our hand to signal the waiting staff for a refill.
Some use for RFIDs that doesn't lead to a police state! Only more beer for all! Horray for bread & circuses!
You don't want another drink, but your glass/table has ordered you another one, and teh waiter brings it over???
and then proceeds to add the drink to the bill even though you didn't drink it, but you did order it.?
Is it REALLY that hard to just walk around and look at peoples' glasses?
Yes, ideally, someday, we can all just lay around half conscious, being tended to by robots. It'll be great, because robots are NEAT!
I think it's good to be a bit of a luddite.
Because the more advanced we become, the drunkerer we get.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
So... RFID tags are our friend now? I'm so confused.
/goes off to get a beer
And I'm still sitting here trying to puzzle out how the signal from the table provides enough power to run the circuitry in the glass. I remember some talk about wireless power and I think Tessla had it figured out a long time ago, but it still boggles my mind :)
And I haven't even started puzzling how a glass full of ice is somehow different than a glass full of beer.
The things geeks play with when they get bored...
What's so interesting about a wireless beer glass--aren't they *all* wireless? Was there a failed wired beer glass prototype that /. didn't report on? ...as for signalling the waiter when you need a refill, it's already the waiter's job to look at the glass and ask the customer if he wants another. If the beer glass replaced this function, then I'd have to start tipping the glass instead of the waiter... and there's no way I'm going to tip my precious glass of beer!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Obi-Wan: These are not the droids you are looking for...
Storm Troopers: Actually sir, yes, they are. These droids have a globally unique identifier that signals they are indeed the droids we are looking for. What's it to you, anyways? *pause* Hey, wait a second! We just scanned your robe and found out that you bought your robe using your Imperial Credit Card....MR. KENOBI
Obi-Wan: Uhhhh... Uhhh...
Is it REALLY that hard to just walk around and look at peoples' glasses?
;)
You haven't been at the Oktoberfest yet
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One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Also kind of throws the "Responsible service Of Alcohol" policy that we have in Australia.
How is the glass going to know how drunk the person is, and if they should be seerved any more alcohol?
I thought we hates RFIDs. No, no we loves them when they have beer involved! Shut up, you! RFIDs are our enemies. Hssssss! But beer is our precioussssss..... NO SHUT UP! SHUT UP!! We hates the RF-trickies. We hates them. I thought.... we liked.... beer... NO! LIES! They all hate you, and track you with RFID tricksies.... the beer is our friend, though, the TV told me so. Lies! Lies with boobies! Nobody likes you! Beer likes me beer was always lyinggg to you. Yess, tricksie. So they can track your beer supply and get you when you're... No! be quiet! Gahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! *sob*
RFID tags are only as evil as those who use them. Just because your beer glass has an RFID tag in it does NOT mean you need a tin-foil hat to go to the bar.
You know, you coudl complain just as much about 802.11 and Bluetooth, because they can be used in similar ways with a little effort.
Monitor the general vicinity of your laptop? Record what store security systems your PDA enters? Hell, triangulate your cel phone signal (and now GPS it), a wireless electronic item quite personally associated with you by a corporate entity, nonetheless.
Please TFY next time. That's "Think For Yourself", and I think it should become as popular as "IANAL" and "RTFA" here on "/."
(Sorry if this was a joke, but the first thing I thought of when I read this article is "Great, another RFID bitchfest")
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
According to our logs you have been drinking way too much beer lately. Report to the nearest government office for rehabilitation. Failure to comply will result in severe beatings.
Not sure if this is just a Banks' (Midlands-based brewery) thing or if it's law, but staff in Banks' pubs are trained to give you a fresh glass each time, never refill on health&safety grounds.
I'd be willing to bet you would have to wait just as long for a refil, since your waiter is most likely responsible for more than just your empty beer glass. The wait time is not due to not noticing, it is due to being in a queue.
A friend of mine is a bartender. It takes me forever to get a refill if his bar is busy, because he knows I'm not going to get mad at him if I have to wait an extra five minutes to get a drink. (and of course, I will be understanding of the extra wait time because an entire evening of drinking costs me $20 with an included $12 tip)
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Squirrel
So they can still serve you even if you're too drunk to be capable of asking for another drink.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Why is it that engineers always invent the best stuff over beers?
At [former employer, large defense contractor], our entire design staff came up the best things at the local bar. Of course, it meant we usually went to the design meeting bleary-eyed and with notes scribbled all over beer-stained cocktail napkins (sometimes still damp).
Many employers give programmers free all-you-can-drink soft drinks. Engineers should get free all-you-can-drink beer. As caffeine boosts productivity for some, alcohol boosts creativity for others.
MmmMM... beer.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Inductive coupling. Those PIC chips don't require much power at ALL to run! Like in the microamp region. All they have to do is put a ferrite flux concentrator in the bottom of the glass, and it will coax the magnetic flux to intercept the energy pickup/transmit coil. The data could be easily be transmitted by selectively loading the coil in a serial fashion. The glass processor could easily use the energy coil's frequency as its clock, hence its serial output stream would be synchronous to its power source - quite easy to detect.
A couple of diodes and a small capacitor is all it takes to recover DC from the field to run the processor on, and those PIC processors are not picky at all on their supply voltages. My guess is they are doing "synchronous rectification" of the field, so they can "modulate" the power converter with the data transmit stream.
All in all, I think its a quite ingenious plan.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
This is just one more piece of evidence to subpeona against you at your DUI trial.
It has been announced that after signalling for the 4th drink it will also notify your partner to go into "sulk mode" and make up the bed in the spare room.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
(Betcha students can't sneak them out of the pub either.)
yeah, yeah, RTFS but...
I'm guessing that this thing works from detecting a change in the intensity of the light reflected back to indicate an empty glass.
However, I wonder if it would have to be adjusted for Guiness vs. Keystone Light (or Pearl Light if you know what that is [w00t! 68 calories]).
By the way, the only reason I drink cheap beer is because I'm poor, not because I have bad taste. (Well, that and the fact that you can drink a lot more at once).
For a real beer drinkers heaven go to Stinkies a 24/7 pub, attach catheter, give waitress credit card, and begin bindge. Taxi or Paramedics will be called when beer glass is full without being drunk from for more than 2 hours.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Ok, we are talking very low power here and everyone has seen the effect mobile phones can have on transmitter/reciever circuits. I havn't bothered to think about it too much (/me lazy :) but having someones phone on the table would have to play havoc with the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the system? Any thoughts?
Somebody would eventually pull up behind me and order. I would get whatever it was they ordered. If it was a big family, I would simply say I got trapped in the line and pass on thru, but if it was another single, chances are he ordered something simple too.. so I would just take it as if nothing happened pay for it, then pull around and park in the lot and watch all the confusion at all the subsequent orders being all out of sync.
Another funny thing is a lot of those order-taker panels were actually little two-way radios. With a strong local mobile rig, you could "capture" the carrier and make do like the restaurant. It was hilarious making do like the order-taker and playing with the customers.
And I post AC for a reason. There may be many out there that remember those pranks.
finally RFIDs are being used for something decent... keeping my beer full!
What of my paranoia?! It has RFIDs in it! It's evil!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"How is the glass going to know how drunk the person is, and if they should be seerved any more alcohol?"
How is the glass going to be able to walk over to the bar, hop under the tap, and fill itself up with more beer?
There's still a person in the equation, so don't worry about it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Do you know that there is a low tech solution that is in use for years? In germany beer mugs have a lid. If the lid is open, the waiter knows you want a refill, if not you don't want a refill...
This solution is also wireless...
It's good to see that technology is getting back to it's roots and is finally being used for something useful.
/sarcasm
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
They should just have a tube with a real time blood test that feeds you beer until your BAC reaches the desired level.
...will the glass report itself to be half empty or half full??
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
...the coffee pot computer.
Now what if those 2 could be combined? Hmmmm...
Geez, this image is 1500x1575 (550 KB) on http://www.merl.com/projects/iGlassware/ ... I feel bad for slow connection users. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Drinking and electronics can only lead to one thing: metal-bending suicidal sarcastic kleptomaniacal robots.
Bite my shiny metal daffodil.
davejenkins.com |
So wait? Anyone with the abillity to log RFID signals, and correspond each glasses unique id to the drinker, can then tell how much beer I've had to drink? No sir, I do not like it! The privacy implications are dire.
What if future generations of the glass rely on implants in the beer. Propriatary implants. Open source (i.e. you know the recipie and can make it yourself) beer will no-longer be compatable and will be illegal under The Digital Millenium Drunkenness Act (DMDA). Beer could be the next DVD! Implanted beer and "clever" beer glasses must be stopped!
Laura
Mitsubishi has created something here that would make for a totally cool geek's page and a really neat thing to find in a few offbeat pubs. Nothing wrong with Mitsubishi patenting such an invention, but the problem is that this thing is destined for the conglomerate-sized markets only. You are not going to find this in a place with any kind of unique character to it, you're only going to find it in yellow and orange plastic-table megarestaurant chains. You'll only see it in the kinds of places where turnover is high and the waitresses have to wear a certain amount of "flair", because those are the only places that will be able to afford ordering 180 of these systems to place in their eastern seaboard chain. In these kinds of places, it's going to be about as cool as the LED reader boards in the drive-through that show you what the teenager on the other side of the inaudible squawk box has punched in to the register. Wireless empty glass detectors and LED reader boards to reduce screwing up your order are alright, but they often seem to wind up being applied to things that have suckage at their cores.
This advice on Oktoberfest bears repeating:
I don't need a mug that tells the staff I need another beer; I need one that tells me I don't!woof.
The Atanassoff-Berry computer was actually largely designed on a napkin while John Vincent Atanassoff and one of his graduate students drank at a local bar. They had decided to get away from the office to "Think the problem through"
Increased beer drinking by #24601 noted, profile trigger, escalating.
Cross-indexing library list.
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Possible federal crime detected, alerting FBI.
Robert Louis Stevenson, author, deceased 1894.
Ammending FBI alert: Murder, consider dangerous...
Of course, this was all done better in Computers Don't Argue by Gordon R. Dickson. How nice that we can now turn an idea from 1965 into reality!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Instead of having a sensor on/in the glass to determine if its going empty or not,, why not make a high tech table that has a spot or a button to place the drink when you want a refill so they know instead of rushing one to you when you finish. This would give the consumer the option to get a drink instead of having one after another till they are blitzed because some consumers (along with me) have the "if I buy it then I might as well drink it" mentality.
I am sure that this approach would be more cost effective then buying 200 of these glasses at $100 a pop.
Back when I frequented Mickey D's, I would often listen in on their headset freq. On a couple of occasions, I would turn the radio way up and cause feedback. "Owww! What the HELL is that?!?!" On one other occasion, the order-taker was being a smart ass. She would ask each and every customer..
OT: "is that everything?"
C: "yes"
OT: "are you sure?"
C: "uh, yes"
OT: "100%"
C: "YES"
so when she asked me if I was sure, I replied, "100%". The next few seconds of silence was among the funniest in memory.
Intelligent Life on Earth
who drink our beers straight out of the bottle, what do we get, aside from the enjoyment of watching a tipsy barmate look at his glass and mutter "this thing's broken" when the servers ignore him...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Unfortunately the problem with Marketing and Sales is that they usually aren't inhibited enough but they still drink...which explains most of the marketing campaigns you see around the place.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Another good way to get free food is to capitalize on the lazy\apathetic cashier's desire for you to leave. It works best with the little add-on items, but anything below $3 or so is a good candidate. I get free nachos at Taco Bell 6/10 times I try this. Make sure it's something you really want, because occasionally you'll end up paying for it.
Order your meal as usual (minus the item you want for free) and pull around to pay. As soon as they tell you the total, have money in hand and say, "oh, I forgot. Can you add xyz?" You have now put the cashier in an uncomfortable position: To do their job or just take the money and give you the item for free. How busy are they? How lazy are they? The money is the goal, and you having it in hand is an added pressure.
Ususally this won't work if there are seperate windows for paying and receiving food. If you want to try it there, pay for your order normally at the first window and then do the addon order at the SECOND window. Second window employees are used to handing out food for nothing.
Thanks everyone, you just slashdotted my BEER.
For the love of God, is NOTHING sacred?
M@
Krispy Cream is people
In one of Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories, our hero is drinking at a party thrown by Elephant, the decendant of the inventor of teleportation. The glasses have a small teleportation receiver in them, and constantly maintain their level of fluid.
Our hero remarks that this is a great way to become an alchoholic without realizing it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ok, so its hard enough now to get the attention of your mistres...er waitress for another round even when you are tipping well and drinking a lot.
Now my waitress will be too busy to serve me because she'll need to be sitting behind a computer monitor quereing tables and feeding that data into a traveling salesman type algorithym to minimize her travel and maximize her tips.
Think of all the data that could be collected though... Which table/individual tips the most, how tips are effected by amount of consumption..after a couple hours a waitress could do a real time analyses of her projected tips for the night. Sweet.
Apple free since 1990!
I can see it now. After it signals the wait staff over 10 times/hr to refill your pint, it logs onto the internet and signs you up for AA meetings, calls the tipsy tow program to haul off your car home from the bar, calls a cab to bring you home and if you refuse to take a ride from the cabbie and you won't cooperate with the tipsey tow then it immediately snatches your keys away from you to prevent you from driving.
... monitoring hubby's beer glass. At glass seven he gets a call on his cell phone. "Harcourt? Harcourt Fenton Mudd, you're drinking again!? This is your seventh glass of beer! You KNOW how you get when you've had too much to drink!" And of course the prosecutor, may it please the court, can provide records showing exactly the number of drinks H. Mudd had to drink when he's brought up for public intoxiation charges.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
And what happened to that poor beer glass's right to privacy? What business is it of the bar computer if it's half empty or half full?
;-)
Heck, if the computer is programmed for basic Zen, that could cause some interesting conniptions once the fluid level reached the halfway point ("Your system is contemplating its WHAT?!")
This could also lead into another option. Include a counter in the PIC chip that, once the consumer reaches a given number of beers, triggers a voice synthesizer to ask for their car keys if they want another refill.
I think I'll go take my meds now...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies