Automated bartender among 40-plus projects at YSU's STEM Showcase

YOUNGSTOWN

You couldn’t tell your troubles to it, but it would probably give faster service and you wouldn’t have to tip it.

Introducing the Juice Box — an automated bartender.

In a back hallway at Moser Hall on the Youngstown State University Campus Saturday, YSU seniors Jordan Brown and Nick Getsy were hastily trying to prepare it for display.

It was a late entry, Brown explained, among 40-plus projects in the 2015 College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Showcase.

An electrical engineering project, the clunky, three-sided steel box might have seemed unassuming alongside fellow projects such as Predicting Protein Subcellular Location (mathematics and statistics) or Synthesis and Characterization of CdSxSex-1 Alloyed Quantum Dots and Silica-Shell Coating (chemistry), but it has a noble purpose.

It’s meant to be a home-automated bartending system, its brochure explains: “Our goal with this design is to promote drinking at home rather than drinking at an establishment that would require driving home,” it reads. “This will potentially save lives and reduce the amount of DUI charges in the United States.”

Take that, Use of Phage Display to Identify Specific Peptide Ligands that Bind to Human Serum Albumin (biology).

But really, it wasn’t a contest.

The showcase, said Dr. Daniel H. Suchora, who helped to organize the event, is to show off the designs and projects that students worked on all year to the community, to prospective employers and to prospective YSU students.”

“To show off YSU, because it’s one of the best-kept secrets in town,” he said.

Read more about the projects in Sunday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.