# Two jars and a live scoreboard

5 September 2026 · The whole team

The two jars on their platforms, mid-way through testing.

Most booths hand out a leaflet. We decided ours would hand out a glass of juice as well.

Instead of a screen looping slides at people walking past: two jars, a tap on each, and a scoreboard that moves while you pour. Sweet lime on one side, melon on the other. Built for the Dharanova stand at the IoT Summit in Vizag, 17 September 2026.

## Why a game and not a demo

The juice was not the point. The point was that noticing a pour, working out how much went into the cup, and putting an honest number on a screen before the cup is set back down is the same problem a device of ours faces in a kitchen.

## What was underneath it

Very little of it was new work. It was mostly the previous work done on load cells, wired together to create an innovative experience.

Weight measurement turned a pour into a number, which is why taking a load cell apart in July was worth the time it took — a reading that drifts while a jar empties is worse than no reading at all. Bluetooth Low Energy carried that number off the jar, which is why the connection work had been worth writing down.

Nothing went to a server, and nothing depended on the venue's wifi, which on the form of most conference halls is the part most likely to let you down. That is the same argument we make about everything we build.

## Making the thing exist

Two glass dispensers, a platform under each, and a month of making them behave.

Harsha, cutting and drilling the bases. Ravi, on the underside of a platform. Mahesh testing through multiple pours. Mahesh, satisfied with his test cases against one jar.

The only way to find out whether a reading holds is to keep handing it something to measure, so a good part of that month was one of us pouring water into a cup and another watching a number to see whether the readings were accurate.

## The half that is not engineering

A month of building got us a working demo.

The entire team tested the booth experience: who stands where, what gets said in the first five seconds, what to do when four people arrive at once, and what to do when nobody arrives for twenty minutes. Then we rehearsed it out loud in our office. There were dry runs.

## What it was, what it was not

Building a booth experience does not make it the end product, by any measure.

It was a way to test a claim we make about ourselves against something real: that an ordinary object — here, a pair of glass juice jars — can be made intelligent, given the right combination of technology and creativity.

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