Student hacks Raspberry Pi to run college bar (original) (raw)

A student at the University of Oxford has modified a

Raspberry Pi to alleviate the workload at his college bar.

Johan Paulsson, who's studying for a PhD in theoretical physics at Wolfson College, was dissatisfied with the performance of the bar.

Students weren't getting their beers as fast or as efficiently as possible -- a tragedy for any "beer manager", Paulsson's official title. "The bar is student run, which means basically it's kind of amateur alley," he explained to Wired.co.uk, "No one really knows what's going on. Me being Swedish, I thought that was completely and utterly inappropriate."

After months of coding, Paulsson successfully redesigned the day-to-day operations of the bar, creating an efficient and speedy service. "When I started no one had any idea what was being sold or at what quantity. I didn't like that at all.

So what I started doing was itemising the till, with the intention of exporting the data from the till into a database -- I have now made this completely automated thanks to the Pi."

Specifically, the Raspberry Pi can fetch sales data at 30-minute intervals directly from the bar, which is stored as a MySQL database and used with plotting tools for data analysis. Parse emails can then be received from suppliers after stock deliveries to cross-reference them with till sales, which can effectively warn staff of stock shortages, as well as update till prices when suppliers change theirs.

There's also a light sensor, "So when the lights of the bar are turned on, the sensor detects the lux rates, which updates the website," saving students from a potentially needless five minute walk through the quads, to the bar and back again.

Paulsson is looking into acquiring more sensors, "I really want to put in a temperature sensor in the back room, so you can have a health and safety idea of what's going on. These things are surprisingly accurate." The system can also automatically create up-to-date menus using LaTeX, a document preparation system and markup language, which has been installed on the Pi.

After investing in a Sonos sound system, which has its own API, Paulsson connected it to the same network as the Pi, which he then programmed to monitor volume levels and adjust settings using python scripts, depending on the time of day and the type of club, society or event using the bar. A separate amplifier is on the same network, controlling settings for another room, hosting a surround sound system, big screen, and Playstation 3. The amplifier is also controlled through python scripts, ensuring that it is reset to the default settings every night, should some of the users forget. "I'm also working on creating a playlist saved by the Pi, so if someone was at the bar and heard a great song, they could check the website later that evening or the following morning and find out exactly what song it was."

Finally, when the bar's student rota manager quit without training a replacement, Paulsson moved all of his responsibilities to the Pi. "There's a database of all the people that have volunteered, so at the start of a new term the Pi sends out an email requesting volunteers to take a shift, providing them with a deadline to comply. After a week, it looks at everyone who hasn't picked a shift and begins assigning them to empty slots automatically. The Pi also sends reminders when shifts are imminent. It has really become a one-stop shop for everything we need now."

Remarkably, the Pi is completely capable of pulling the pints as well as handling databases and till management, but Paulsson daren't go that far, "The Pi doesn't do any form of the dispensing at all. Although that is possible, it would run afoul of British law, since you need a 'responsible person' behind the bar and I don't think a computer counts, even though it would technically meet all of the legal requirements."

Paulsson highlights other elements of the Pi setup that could veer into moral grey areas "We could see which user in college is down in the bar most often, but I don't think they would be particularly happy to be called out on that."

Despite opportunities to turn this system into a profit-making business, Paulsson has no interest for now. "It has been suggested to me, so I gave it a little bit of thought. It's just this is more of a hobby that happens to be very useful. I could monetise this, I could, I very much could. But I'm not really interested. At the most I might clean it up and open source it. But really I just do it for the love it."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK