If you have any kind of business, chances are it involves stickers at some point in the process. More accurately it involves you peeling the backs off of sticker after sticker, slowly wasting time and working your way toward a repetitive stress injury. Why do that to yourself when you could have a machine do it for you?

That’s exactly the thinking behind [Mr Innovative]’s automatic label dispensing machine. All he has to do is load up the roll of labels, dial in the length of each label, and away the machine goes, advancing and dispensing and taking up the empty paper all at once. In fact, that’s how it works: the take-up reel is on the shaft of a NEMA-17 stepper motor, which gets its instructions from an Arduino Nano and an A4988 motor driver. Our favorite part is the IR sensor located underneath the sticker that’s ready to take — the machine doesn’t feed another until it senses that you’ve taken the previous sticker. We stuck the demo and build video after the break.

Our other favorite thing about this build is that [Mr Innovative] seems to have used the same PCB as his freaky fast bobbin winder.

It’s often taken for grated, but the modern world is full of luxuries. Home automation, grocery delivery, and even access to the Internet are great tools to have at hand, but are trivial to most of us. If these modern wonders are not enough for you, and the lap of luxury is still missing a certain je ne sais quoi, allow us to introduce you to the ultimate convenience: a voice controlled, beer-dispensing sofa with a built-in refrigeration system.

This is a project from [Garage Avenger] and went through a number of iterations before reaching this level of polish. Metal work on the first version didn’t fit together as expected, and there were many attempts at actual refrigeration before settling on repurposing an actual refrigerator. With those things out of the way, he was able to get to the meat of a project. The couch-refrigerator holds 12 beers, and they are on a conveyor belt which automatically places the next beer onto the automated drawer. When commanded (by voice, app, or remote) the sofa opens the drawer so the occupant can grab one easily without having to move more than an arm. Everything, including the voice recognition module, is controlled by an Arduino, as is tradition.

The attention to detail is excellent as well. The remote control contains a built-in bottle opener, for one, there are backlights and a glass cover for the refrigerator, and the drawer is retracted automatically when it senses the beer has been obtained. We couldn’t ask for much more from our own couches, except maybe that they take us where we want to go. But maybe it’s best to keep these two couch use cases separate for now.

Sometimes, along comes a build project that is not so much a fail, as how not to do it. First off, some of us here had to look up what a Pocky is, never having heard, seen or tasted one – seriously. Once satisfied, we turned our attention to [Michael]’s Automated Pocky Dispenser. Took a while for us to figure out if it’s useful or not. But it’s a fun, quick project that [Michael] put together in around an hour using parts lying around in his office.

For those of you who’d like to know, a Pocky is a chocolate-coated biscuit stick, although you can also buy it in other flavors. You can grab one from a box, but maybe it tastes better when you dispense it by banging a big red button. [Michael] says he used  incredibly advanced construction techniques, but we leave it to our readers to decide on that. The key element of the build is the special “flexible coupling” that he built to transfer the rotation of the stepper motor to the dispensing mechanism. The rest of the build consists of an Arduino, stepper motor, driver, and giant red button. Special motor driving code ensures that the dispenser wiggles back and forth every time, preventing any stuck Pocky’s. And the Electronics is, well, hanging out for all to see. Happy with the success of his build, [Michael] is planning an upgraded version – to connect the Pocky Dispenser to the cloud for statistical gathering of office Pocky habits. He claims even Google does not have that data. To see the dispenser in action, check out the video below.