Introduction
Imagine: you’re sitting at the movie theater, waiting for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker to begin. You whip out an ice-cold Coca-Cola bottle to quench your thirst, only to find that it’s turned into a lightsaber! You are the last Jedi, the one chosen to bring balance to the force!
Your eyes pop open and you realize it was just a dream (maybe you shouldn’t have stayed up all night binging The Mandalorian), triggered by Coca-Cola’s latest attempt to get you to drink soda without sugar: a light-up Coke bottle. How did they fit a battery and an OLED into that plastic wrapper? There’s only one way to find out: let’s tear it down.
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Tools
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This bottle has it all:
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Zero sugar
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Zero calories
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An elegant weapon for a more civilized age
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A nice caffeine kick to get you through the afternoon
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Is X-ray vision documented as a force ability? Because our friends at Creative Electron got it!
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Can't start a lightsaber-bottle teardown without a lightsaber for scale!
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Our bottles face off and—with the full power of the Force—light up just a little!
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The Rise of Skywalker may have the true answer to which side wins, but both sabers are pretty cool in our spoiler-free opinion...
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Before we can get started, we've got to get rid of this Coca-Cola...
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To remove the cap, power on your lightsaber and carefully slice off the top of the bottle.
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Green milk it ain't, but I guess we'll drink up this bubbly stuff, for the sake of the teardown.
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Since the lightsaber was being a little too destructive, we reach for an iOpener to soften up the adhesive under the plastic wrapper.
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Our first look inside! This is definitely not your ordinary Coke bottle.
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Carefully peeling away the paper-backed circuit, we find:
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The OLED panel
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Kyber crystalsBattery packs -
Membrane switches
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That's all to this drinkable lightsaber!
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Inuru, the company behind these limited-edition bottles, hopes to usher in a new era of smart labels with this technology.
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Though they claim to use "eco-friendly materials", we can't help but cringe at the e-waste implications of products like this going mainstream. To put it one way: This is not the future we're looking for.
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We cannot deny, however, that this is a very cool bottle. How does it score on our repairability scale, you ask?
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Hmmm.... Ponder on it, we must.
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8 comments
Wow, they actually put an OLED panel to illuminate lightsaber, I wonder how much a bottle costs in Singapore.
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USD 1.50? We had to search for clues to locate a representative from Coca Cola to get a ticket from a collection station, than purchase the bottle at the nearest 7-11. 8000 bottles available, they said
If you want a more challenging teardown, try a WowWee CHiP. WowWee seems to be very “screw-happy“ with their products, placing a hard-to-count number of screws in virtually every product I know.
So what kind of battery chemistry does it use?
Good question! The site has little to say about the battery, other than the fact that it’s similar to fruit. I would hypothesize that it’s multiple little battery packs in series, each with an acidic gel electrolyte between anode and cathode plates.
it´s this one cf042722u