I was looking for jobs in the summer of 2011 and came across an awesome sounding one for a product development company called Synapse. I was attempting to find a way to stand out from the other applicants when I read the last line of the job description. They wanted someone who had a personal martini making robot. The requirement was a joke but a challenge. What other applicant would actually make a robotic martini maker? I wanted to apply for the job quickly so my build needed to be fast utilizing components that I had laying around. Luckily, I had pretty much everything I needed.

There are many ways to make a martini but I decided to go with the International Bartenders Association recipe listed on Wikipedia. It calls for 6 parts gin and 1 part vermouth to be poured into a glass with ice cubes. Stir well and strain into a chilled glass. Squeeze oil from a lemon peel onto the drink or garnish with an olive.

I created a sketch of a proposed system diagram. Two peristaltic pumps would move the alcohol from their bottles to a mixing chamber prefilled with ice. A DC motor with beater would stir the mixture. A valve would then open separating the ice from the mixture and letting it fall into a prechilled glass. Lastly I would place an olive in the glass. I initially wanted to chill the glass with a can of compressed air and automatically spear and dispense an olive. I ran out of time quickly and these features never made it into the final product.

The build was done in the style of a demo board. Components were laid out on a piece of ABS plastic in the simplest way possible. A priming override button was added to manually fill the lines with alcohol prior to mixing a drink. The mixing motor was mounted on the back side of the board. A bendable extension for an electric drill was used to route the mechanical output 90 degrees.

A circuit was developed and sketched out. The design relied on a lot of the same principles used in my cat food dispenser. The circuit was created on a proto board and wired up to an Arduino. A small program was written for the Arduino that controlled the mixing ratios by the duration that the pump was active.

After a couple of weekends of  work, I enjoyed the first automatically made martini. I also successfully showcased the dispenser when I started interviewing at Synapse. I ended up getting the job. Who knows how much this project contributed!