Liquor Picker

Making campus drinking safer with technology

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Inspiration

Drinking on college campuses is the root cause for a multitude of issues, ranging from personal injury to damage to property to sexual assault. We set out to try to do a small part in making it safer to drink on campus.

What it does

Our concept is a machine much like a fountain drink machine, but for alcoholic beverages. Because the hardware side was impractical to develop, we instead focused on the interface. The idea is that by having technology behind the dispensing of alcohol, we can more easily control the amount of alcohol in each drink, keep people responsible and cut them off when they've had too much, and provide financial incentive for them not to drink if we so choose. We hope to partner with SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) and contribute some portion of the revenue that we receive from our service to their cause.

The way the service actually works is that (for most parties) users preregister in the system using their school issued ID card, and load their balance before the party if they'll need it. The organization running the party then has complete control through our interface to control whether ID cards will be required to dispense drinks, how many drinks after which to cut party-goers off, and how much, if anything, to charge. Once all the users have registered and the party organizer has ironed out their preferred settings, the party can begin! Users have choices from a number of alcoholic options and mixers. The system keeps track of how many drinks each user has had and alerts them if they are at the imposed limit, as well as if they've run out of funds. Each pour is designed to be exactly one drink, and calories are listed.

How we built it

The majority of the system is built in Webflow, which was super nice, particularly for designing a pretty front end for our webapp. Having no experience with the system yesterday, we were able to learn it from scratch and build this whole project in less than a day.

We also used Javascript, in particular Jquery, for some of the more dynamic elements of the system like the drink pouring.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of the challenges we ran into had to do with the dynamic parts that we had to use Jquery for. Dealing with the dynamic information from the CMS was very tricky

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Pretty much everything you can see! We never thought we'd get this far!

What we learned

Same as above. We knew nothing about Webflow coming into this and it's a skill we hope to keep using in the future!

What's next for Liquor Picker

We're hoping to start working on the hardware component of the device and eventually talking to local party organizers to see if we can get it into real use!

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