Scrubber Plays Spotify Jams While You Wash Your Hands

As COVID-19 expands its reach around the globe, it has never been more important to follow the guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO) and national/local governments to keep the virus at bay. The most recommended procedures that we can employ is maintaining social distances (three to six feet) while out and frequently washing our hands. When it comes to the latter, there are many techniques to get hands clean and virus-free, and believe it or not, it takes about 20-seconds to lather up.

To help ease the boredom of those 20 seconds, the Deeplocal team has created a soap dispenser that plays snippets of your favorite songs from Spotify when the pump is pressed.

Deeplocal designed the aptly named Scrubber around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, along with an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet, some wire, copper tape, and a battery pack. According to the engineering think-tank, Scrubber utilizes Spotify’s API, which is wrapped in a custom node script that authenticates with your Spotify account. It then downloads and processes tracks, and plays then via the Speaker Bonnet. The process repeats for every pump of the soap dispenser.

Deeplocal states the Scrubber is the first device in their “Cabin Fever” series of projects to be produced during the pandemic. It allows employees to showcase their creativity using exploratory work and out of the box thinking. The firm states some of the projects are aimed at solving real challenges that face the medical community, while others are geared at injecting a bit of fun while we endure this pandemic.

For those would like to recreate the Scrubber, Deeplocal has uploaded the build files and code on Hackster and GitHub.