The beer-launching mini-fridge

March Here’s further evidence that necessity is the mother of invention. Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering/Computer Science graduate John W Cornwall seems to rejoice in building interesting contraptions but his latest just could be a killer app. He has designed a fridge that gets the beer for you. His beer launching fridge took “about 3 months and several hundred dollars” to build, resulting in the world’s first fully automated, remote controlled, beer-launching mini-fridge. With a “magazine” of 10 cans, his first fridge was controlled by a keyless entry system. Such was the response to a video of the catapulting fridge, there’s now a good chance the fridge will go into limited edition production with a price tag of US$1500.

Version 2.0 of the launcher will have a few improvements including its own purpose-built remote control so you can rotate it to the direction of your choise and select one of ten programmable angles and the magazine capacity (mini-fridge size) will be closer to 20 beers. The distance will be adjustable manually so you can dial in the perfect throw to your position on the couch, and repeat it every time. John is currently assessing production runs for the fridge so if you are interested, email him here.