The World's Drunkest Programmer... is he in your office?

By Alex Handy

June 11, 2012 — (Page 1 of 2)
The actual title of “The World's Drunkest Programmer” may never be given out in any official capacity, but thanks to the Arduino prototyping platform, the availability of cheap kegerators and the wanton need for frosty refreshment buried deep within the programmer psyche, any team with about US$1,000 can figure out who is the drunkest programmer in the office. The title, of course, can be given out through data analysis.

When Felix Sargent and Chris Gilmer, software engineers at Rackspace, were informed by human resources that the company was moving its San Francisco offices into the trendy district south of Market Street, the pair decided they needed to build something special for the forthcoming office opening party.

That something special was a homebrew Kegbot. The term comes from kegbot.org, where this open-source project’s creator, Mike Wakerly, has stationed the project's information. Its specifications and software can be used to turn an ordinary kegerator (basically, a mini-fridge with a tap coming out of the top) into a tablet-driven, RFID-using, beer-dispensing open-source project.

But while Sargent and Gilmer were inspired by Kegbot, they ended up building their entire project from scratch. Under normal circumstances, such a whole-hog rewrite would seem nonsensical, but the pair had a very good reason for trying it on their own: They could get everyone involved.

Kegbot

“We wrote it all. We decided to get everybody to chip in,” said Gilmer. “A couple of people worked on the Arduino code, and I wrote the Python code to talk to the Arduino. We have great developers and front-end designers, and they wrote the interface for the computer. We did a computer connected via USB to the Arduino. The Arduino was polling the machine, and we took updates from the machine and saved them in a database. You could log in and see what was going on.”

Just what was going on? The software allowed users to view the keg's temperature, pressure and fullness level based on the amount consumed. But most importantly, it could track who drank what.

“We issued everyone an RFID card,” said Gilmer. “We bought several hundred—and some subsection of those we hand-painted—one for every employee in the office.” In theory, each user's exact consumption, to the liter, would be measured and recorded.

Related Search Term(s): Arduino, Kegbots

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Comments

06/12/2012 04:38:13 PM EST

Rackspace's adventures into Kegerator's source code is available here: https://github.com/philips/tapkick

United StatesFelix Sargent

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