Sneeze into your hand, not your elbow with this nose-shaped sanitizer dispenser

You have to like a language like German, where not only is it possible for a word or two to replace a complex concept, but you don't You don't even need to speak the language to figure out what it all means. Of course, when your project is a giant nose pretending to sneeze sanitizer into your hands, it doesn't matter if you call it Der niesende Desinfektionsmittelspender. Humor based on bodily functions is, after all, the universal language.

Working knowledge of German or not, understanding exactly what [Nina] is doing here isn't too difficult. Judging from the video below and the build log, the idea is to detect the presence of a hand under the dispenser with a simple IR reflective sensor hooked up to some sort of microcontroller - an ESP32 in this case. Sneeze audio clips are stored on an SD card and played through a small speaker, while a hobbyist servo presses a button on an atomizer. It seems that selecting the right distributor was the hardest part of the project; [Nina] eventually settled on a battery operated fogger that was just the right size to fit in her nose. Oh, didn't we mention the giant, pink, 3D-printed nose that houses the whole thing? Sorry, that's pretty subtle and easy to miss.

Anyway, the whole project is a lot of fun and really made us laugh when we saw it. It's a clever way to gently poke fun at germaphobes who have invented other, less fancy methods of dispensing hand sanitizer. But let's face it, they ended up proving themselves.

Thank you, [Stefan], for that tip.