Calling this one awesome might be a bit far-fetched, but it sure was a lot of fun.
My friend and I used to visit this pub every day after work. He has a background in electricity, I myself am a software developer. Arduino was new and hot, and ever since we'd both bought one we spent a lot of our evenings at a corner of the bar coming up with new projects and filling every beer coaster within range with schematics.
One night my friend arrived wearing a baseball cap reading "1 beer please", and when he wanted to order he called the bartender and pointed at the text. The bartender smiled, and then commented that the cap was not much of use whenever he wanted to order more than one beer. We all laughed about this at first, but as the night went on he continued to make the same remark, up until the point where it started to annoy us. So we went to our imaginary drawing board and started discussing how hard it would be to "improve" the cap. We ended up betting the bartender a crate of beer that we could add the necessary electronics to be able to order anything between one and nine beers, or a round for the entire bar, using only parts we had available or could salvage from old equipment, and that we would do so within a time frame of two hours.
So a few days later we arrived with the tools and parts we needed. A 7-segment display was duct taped over the "1" on the cap, and soldered to a stripped CAT5 cable. A regular led was inserted at the top of the cap, and soldered to a stripped RJ11 cable. Both cables went through the back of a sweater, and were connected to an arduino which was in the sweater's pocket. We used a basic 12 digit keypad as input, and made it so that pressing [1-9]# would display the number on the display, 0# would cause the top led to start blinking (indicating a round for the entire bar), and pressing * would turn all the led's off.
We finished well within our time frame, had lots of fun showing off the end result, and the sulky look on the bartender's face when he gave us our crate made those the best free beers ever.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, "Yet another customer buys Raspberry Pi + recommended components and installs RetroPi"?
Calling this one awesome might be a bit far-fetched, but it sure was a lot of fun.
My friend and I used to visit this pub every day after work. He has a background in electricity, I myself am a software developer. Arduino was new and hot, and ever since we'd both bought one we spent a lot of our evenings at a corner of the bar coming up with new projects and filling every beer coaster within range with schematics.
One night my friend arrived wearing a baseball cap reading "1 beer please", and when he wanted to order he called the bartender and pointed at the text. The bartender smiled, and then commented that the cap was not much of use whenever he wanted to order more than one beer. We all laughed about this at first, but as the night went on he continued to make the same remark, up until the point where it started to annoy us. So we went to our imaginary drawing board and started discussing how hard it would be to "improve" the cap. We ended up betting the bartender a crate of beer that we could add the necessary electronics to be able to order anything between one and nine beers, or a round for the entire bar, using only parts we had available or could salvage from old equipment, and that we would do so within a time frame of two hours.
So a few days later we arrived with the tools and parts we needed. A 7-segment display was duct taped over the "1" on the cap, and soldered to a stripped CAT5 cable. A regular led was inserted at the top of the cap, and soldered to a stripped RJ11 cable. Both cables went through the back of a sweater, and were connected to an arduino which was in the sweater's pocket. We used a basic 12 digit keypad as input, and made it so that pressing [1-9]# would display the number on the display, 0# would cause the top led to start blinking (indicating a round for the entire bar), and pressing * would turn all the led's off.
We finished well within our time frame, had lots of fun showing off the end result, and the sulky look on the bartender's face when he gave us our crate made those the best free beers ever.