As if DRM (Digital Rights Management) wasn’t enough in the digital world, the boffins at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland have created a chair where you can only sit on it for a total of 8 times. After which the chair falls apart and you need to buy a new chair. Yes, you read that correctly, you can only sit on this chair 8 times. Although to be fair I can think of some really good practical jokes that can be played with this chair 🙂
The design of the chair is fairly simple; all the joints of the chair are cast in wax with a piece of nichrome wire embedded in the wax. An Arduino with a small switch keeps track of how many times the chair has been used, while a solenoid taps out how many uses are left in the chair every time the user gets up. When the internal counter reaches zero, a relay sends power through the nichrome wire, melting the wax, and returning the chair to its native dowel rod and wooden board form.
Hopefully folks will realize that this is not really practical and not decide to release it as an actual product.
Thanks to Hack a Day for the initial story.
– Suramya