JägerMachine Pours Shots When It Receives Emails

Pegor and his friend Jon have a tradition of giving each other Jägermeister-themed gifts. Don’t worry; they do this as an inside joke and not because they think that Jägermeister is actually good or something. Receiving glasses with the Jägermeister logo gets boring after a while, inside joke or not. To up the ante, Pegor built this JägerMachine that pours a shot every time it receives the right email.

Even though Pegor built JägerMachine for a running gag, he put real effort into it and it is absolutely gorgeous. It has a beautiful wood enclosure with brushed steel accents. The glass sits in an RGB LED-lit cubby and the interface displays on a nice LCD touchscreen panel. We have to assume that the folks over at Jägermeister headquarters are drooling over this device and would love to one in their office. Luckily for them and you, dear reader, this is an open source project that anyone can replicate.

JägerMachine detects the presence of a glass in the cubby using a Hall effect sensor. With a glass in the cubby, the machine will allow a pour. A user can push a button on the touchscreen interface to start a pour or the machine will pour a shot automatically when it receives an email with the proper formatting. The latter function is fun, because it means that Pegor can remotely pour a shot for Jon (who would, of course, feel obligated to drink it).

A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ handles all of the operation. It dispenses Jägermeister using a peristaltic pump controlled by the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins through an H-bridge driver (with a hex inverter IC to flip the logic). A WS2812B individually addressable RGB LED ring illuminates the glass’s cubby. The display is a generic 3.5” DSI-interface touchscreen LCD with a resolution of 800x480. There isn’t any sensor to detect how much Jägermeister goes into the glass, so the Raspberry Pi just activates the dispensing pump for a preset amount of time.

A custom PCB tidies up the connections between components and a pair of fans keep everything cool. Many of the parts, including the interior framework for mounting the parts, were 3D-printed. Pegor coded services that start at boot to check emails, monitor the touchscreen interface, control the LEDs, and so on.

Pegor didn’t finish the project in time for Jon’s birthday, but surely Jon forgave the delay when he received this beautiful machine.