Skip to main content

These LED ice cubes can text your friend when you are too drunk

cheers ice cubes in use
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Developed by a 23-year-old MIT student named Dhairya Dand after an alcohol-induced blackout during a college party, the Cheers LED ice cubes keep track of the amount of alcohol that’s being consumed by a specific person. Placed within a glass, the LED cubes have been designed to change colors as drinks are consumed. Based on Dand’s personal alcohol tolerance, he designed the cube to stay green during the first drink, transition to yellow during the second drink and change to red during the third drink to warn Dand that he’s reaching his limit. It’s likely that the cubes could be adjusted for different people based on various levels of alcohol tolerance.

cheers ice cubesThis is accomplished by keeping track of the current time in addition to using an accelerometer to monitor the number of sips of each drink. Other hardware used within the cube includes a small LED light, a battery and an IR transceiver.

This hardware has been encased within an edible jelly which is also waterproof. Dand has also designed the cubes to react to ambient noise and the LED lights within the cube will flash intermittently with music being played at a party, club or bar.

If Dand continues to drink alcohol beyond the third drink, he’s designed the cube to connect with his smartphone and trigger a text message to a close friend. In reference to the texting function, Dand said “The cubes talk to your phone to make the call. They communicate over IR with a custom removable IR receiver fitted on the smartphone’s audio jack,” in an interview with ABC News. Ideally, his friend would attempt to get in contact with Dand in order to convince him to stop drinking before triggering another alcohol-induced blackout. 

Dand spent approximately $50 in materials when developing the prototype of the Cheers ice cubes, but isn’t interested in getting a patent for the invention despite significant interest from other MIT students. Regarding further development on the Cheers LED ice cubes, Dand stated “I believe in open-source. My inventions are are open to be hacked, developed and played around.”

Mike Flacy
By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more