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Digital drinking buddy replaces ill-advised tweets with cat pics

Better than a breathalyser 鈥� build a clever coaster to ensure there鈥檚 no more Twitter after too much liquor

鈥淚 enjoy a quiet drink at home,鈥� says Michael Bacchus. 鈥淭rouble is, a few beers in I find myself tweeting Game of Thrones spoilers. Can you help me avoid upsetting my friends?鈥�

Embarrassing tweets happen to us all: that鈥檚 why every 28 April we celebrate Ed Balls day, and every time I鈥檝e had some wine I wax lyrical about Patrick Stewart. Could a digital drinking buddy keep me in check?

First, I needed a way to measure my drinking. A reed switch inside a coaster could detect when I raised my glass, but would require magnets to be glued to my glassware. With visions of tumblers stuck to the sides of my dishwasher, I settled on a force-sensitive resistor to measure pressure.

Tracking the total weight of booze didn鈥檛 work: topping up my glass convinced the coaster I鈥檇 drunk a negative amount of wine. Counting sips was simpler. Now, what to do once the coaster knows I鈥檓 buzzed?

I added a Feather, a tiny, Wi-Fi-enabled circuit board made by Adafruit, to my coaster. Having it access a parental control app to lock my phone proved error-prone. With an internet-linked power socket, I could trigger the nuclear option and cut power to my router, but this would also take out Netflix 鈥� unacceptable collateral damage.

So I turned to If This Then That (IFTTT), an online service that allows thousands of apps and devices to interact. My coaster could now send warning tweets on my behalf, but this was more damage limitation than protection. Then I hit on the purr-fect solution.

Twitter limits how many tweets you can send in an hour. Going over triggers a temporary ban. If my coaster could tweet enough cat pictures to put my account on lockdown, I couldn鈥檛 post anything embarrassing. In hindsight, one cute cat every 100 milliseconds might have been overkill. But it definitely landed me in Twitter jail. Result: a super-effective coaster 鈥� although my digital cat cannon may prove more annoying than Game of Thrones spoilers.

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