We’ve all suddenly discovered there’s something even more tedious than watching paint dry: washing our hands for 20 whole seconds. To make the necessary but excruciating process feel like it doesn’t drag on forever, this soap pump speaker swaps Happy Birthday for tracks from your Spotify account.
The Scrubber was created by the hardware hackers at Pittsburgh’s Deeplocal who shared a complete parts list, build instructions, and even the custom code they developed over on Github for anyone with the requisite skills (wiring, soldering, programming, etc.) to build for themselves.
When complete, fully functional, and presumably properly waterproofed given the eventual close proximity of all those electronics to a working faucet, the Scrubber will automatically play 20 seconds of randomly selected music from your most played Spotify tracks of the week so you’ll actually want to sing along.
To ensure maximum entertainment and tedium distraction value, those 20-second song snippets aren’t randomly selected from the middle of a track either. Instead, they’re taken from the preview clip that Spotify makes publicly available for every track. The clips are algorithmically selected to include the best part of a given song. So in addition to ensuring that hand washing is being done for an adequate length of time, the Scrubber will also potentially encourage people to wash their hands more often with the chance to revisit their favourite hits. Every little distraction helps.