So when I bought my house among other things one of the quirks was that the bar height for the kitchen was too high. The highest barstool I could get was 34 inches but my bar needed 38”.  As I learnt woodwork and finished my storage room and setup a small electronics setup, the desire to build a cooler barstool surfaced.

So among other things what did I want in barstool? Since I already bartend and provide a very unique speakeasy setup I wanted the barstool to be unique, and have a cool design and lots of lights!

Following are few ideas from my pinterest board: Follow Vaibhav’s board Interactive Barstool Design Ideas on Pinterest.

So in addition to it having a cool design, lots of lights what do I want this barstool to do?

  • Encourage people to talk to each other

  • Make it easy for the bartender to be more hospitable to you

  • Detect when someone is too drunk to drive

  • Provide a virtual coaster – to let people know that I’m still at the seat!

  • Have a coat hook

Now that I have put some thought, how should I go about building it? I’m planning to use the Intel Edison board to enable this stool to be connected to a phone app and you can program Edison in Node.js! I want to keep the design simple but elegant with Gaudi like curves and a simple hinging mechanism, a laser cutter would be sufficient for the job! I want to add a artisically designed acrylic piece to the wood work so the lights some through. I’m planning to use simple 10-12 LED lights per stool.

Can this be done in 48 hours? So why 48 hours  you say - well i’m thinking of doing this project at startup weekend makers edition. I think if I have a woodworker, a 3D/2D designer, a couple of softeware devs and one electrial/electronics engineers on my team then we can pull this through fairly easily and even have time to enjoy a couple of drinks and play some fun games with our stools!