Never Let Your Drink Run Dry with This DIY Desktop Dispenser

There is a problem plaguing desk jockeys around the world that the media refuses to acknowledge: glasses that eventually run dry as you drink from them. Getting up from your desk to refill your glass robs your employer, or clients, of valuable productivity — and stealing is wrong. What can an ethical, yet thirsty, worker do with such a dilemma? Build yourself a Waterboy 3000 automatic drink dispenser, of course!

This project comes to us from the Lab Stream YouTube channel, and it’s the solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had. The Waterboy 3000 is a electronic coaster contraption that automatically refills your glass anytime you set it down. Your drink of choice is stored in a large vessel of some kind, and a peristaltic pump is used to siphon it into your drinking glass whenever a load cell detects a reduction in the weight of the glass.

If you want to build your own, you’ll need a 3D printer for the mechanical parts, a peristaltic pump, a 1kg strain gauge load cell, an HX711 amplifier, an Arduino Pro Micro, and a lot of your favorite beverage. Lab Stream has provided the OpenSCAD 3D files and the Arduino code over on GitHub. Assembling the Waterboy 3000 looks straightforward enough, so you should be dispensing drinks and working productively again in just a few hours.