The Robofun Create Beer Can Keyboard!

This beer can keyboard was designed by Romanian tech company Robofun Create for beer company Staropramen.

Staropramen were one of the sponsors at Webstock (the biggest blogging and social media event in Romania) and they wanted a new and exciting way to promote their competition to win a trip to Prague to the Webstock visitors.

So that is where Robofun Create and the beer can keyboard came in. They got 44 Staropramen beer cans and connected them to an Arduino board and some capacitive controllers connected to a Raspberry PI board.

Each beer can represented a key – just like on a standard keyboard and whenever it was touched by a user, the corresponding letter would appear on a plasma screen.

Robofun said:

“the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.”

It makes sense, who wouldn’t want to try out a beer can keyboard! Watching the video of people trying out the keyboard really made me want to have a go to see if I could type any faster on it than those who were featured!

I’m also a little surprised that there wasn’t a joker in the pack who thought it would be funny to nab one of the beer can keys and drink from it!