Has another calorie-laden holiday left you with a mountain of candy and very little willpower to resist it? Eating chocolate bunnies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is less appealing when they’re upgraded with edible electronics and an Arduino that makes the bunny scream in terror as you bite off its body parts.
Trying to avoid a headache or a sugar crash is enough motivation for some of us to hide the Easter leftovers deep in the freezer, but for those who can’t resist the siren’s call of all that chocolate, negative psychological reinforcement could very well be a better approach — assuming they’re empathetic enough to feel bad when a bunny’s screaming about its ear being bitten off.
Even with electric chopsticks and camera-equipped pills you can swallow, electronics and food are a tough pairing, requiring YouTube’s Repeated Failure channel to experiment with different approaches to making edible wires that were both safe to eat and conductive enough to trigger an Arduino to play screaming sound effects. Everything from silver cake paint to a conductive flavourless paste called oleogel were tested, but most simply weren’t conductive enough for this creation to work. Eventually, the YouTuber settled on silver leaf, which is just pure silver pounded as flat as delicate tissue paper. In small amounts, it’s been deemed safe to consume.
A trio of silver loops were applied to the back of a chocolate bunny and then wired into the Arduino using copper tape, and the rest of the electronics, including a speaker, were hidden away inside a 3D-printed base that looked like a grassy hill the bunny was sitting on.
Depending on which part of the bunny is bitten off — its tail, its ears, or its entire head — a different unsettling scream will play, which will hopefully deter further consumption. It’s a clever idea, but why stop at bunnies? A pizza with a conductive crust that audibly counts out every slice you eat would be a welcome upgrade too for those of us who can’t seem to stop until the entire box is empty.