Introducing iZac, the Android Bartender

In a previous post, I alluded to a larger project I was working on in the physical/electronics/maker world, and now after much development, I'm pleased to present iZac, the Android Bartender!

A while ago I was inspired by Drink Making Unit 2.0 by Evil Mad Scientist Labs, and decided I wanted to build my own barbot. In this post I'll go over the high level details of what I did and why I did it.

One problem with any drink-dispensing machine is the difficulty of sourcing parts for interacting with food liquids. Pumps are expensive or impractical, valves are likewise problematic and difficult to obtain. My original intention was to use syringe pumps - effectively a DC motor hooked up to a threaded rod that pushes a syringe plunger in and out - and that was the reason behind my making the motor driver shield I wrote about previously. Unfortunately, syringe pumps turned out to be too fiddly and unreliable to use for the barbot, so I had to look for an alternate solution.

I ended up using a similar approach to that used by the DMU2.0, employing a battery powered aquarium pump to pressurize the ...