If you can dream it, you can 3D print it. The range of items coming from engineers and innovators is amazing. For example, how about a 3d printed breathalyzer?

The inspiration behind the 3D printed DrinkMate was “Be safe and make the right decisions.” According to its developers, Shaun Masavage, an electromechanical engineer, and Mack Redding, another engineer, it is the smallest breathalyzer in the world. You simply plug it into your Android smartphone to display your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) on screen.

The breathalyzer market desperately needed some innovation to make such life-saving tools more accessible. DrinkMate’s design targets a price point that’s more affordable to a larger number of people. The idea is that its size and convenience will encourage sharing among peers and increase the general awareness of the amount of alcohol consumed. A goal was to turn the typically negative stigma surrounding peer pressure into a positive life-saving tool.

By interfacing with an app, the DrinkMate experience is tailored to each user. Masavage and Redding can add and update features to allow things such as BAC tracking and logging of results for side-by-side comparison of BAC vs. drink/food consumption. Thus, people can learn how they personally react to different drinking scenarios and learn how to make better and safer decisions in the future. Masavage devised the hardware for this device and Redding was in charge of creating DrinkMate’s app.

To design such a small breathalyzer, these two engineers started from scratch. Said Masavage, “We knew that to make a new breakthrough in size reduction, we couldn’t have any bias from existing larger designs.  That’s how we ended up with a prototype that fits in all pockets.”

“I’m a hardware guy and creating dazzling prototypes for ideas is in my DNA,” continued Masavage. “However, the steps afterwards are not trivial by any means. The gap between prototype and product is immense, intimidating, and stops the majority of inventors from bringing their ideas to market.”

“But I knew that if I were to make DrinkMate a reality, I needed to have a 100% final design in my hands to test, especially the plastic enclosure to ensure that any future plastic injection molded components would work properly. Filing, drilling, and carving an enclosure by hand was out of the question for the complex curves, hollow areas, and twists needed.

So Masavage turned to Sculpteo to 3D print the enclosures. The prints were dimensionally accurate enough to drop Masavage’s circuit board inside with no wiggle room. Sculpteo offered batch printing for the final round of 40 samples, dropping the unit cost by almost 70% each.

The project is now on Kickstarter, as the inventors seek manufacturing funding.

Leslie Langnau
llangnau@wtwhmedia.com