When you want to relax with a nice hot cup of tea, the last thing you need is the stress of dunking the teabag in and out of the hot water, right? [Andylear] got tired of it and he has a 3D printer, so he set about solving the problem.
The solution uses a standard mini servo and the VarSpeedServo Arduino library. This library uses interrupts to control speed and position of up to 8 servos. All servos can operate at once and you can control both the position of the servo and the speed of the motion required to get it there. Commands can be asynchronous or you can wait for them to complete and you can even send sequences of commands to each servo.
It always surprises us there aren’t more kitchen hacks although we do see a few (like this timer or the PID tuning for espresso). We’ve even seen another tea automation project before. Although it might seem frivolous to some, this kind of repetitive motion machine is a staple in a lot of industrial processes and if it were dunking PC boards into etchant or dunking circuit boards into a cleaning bath, it’d probably get a lot more respect.
If you want to see a slightly more taxing example of VarSpeedServo, have a look at the video below.
No video of it in operation? Did I miss it? I at least want an animated gif!
I’ve heard you get more tannins and a more bitter flavor when you dunk.
Someone studied this and found there’s no functional difference between tea that’s left alone, and tea that is dunked/stirred.
Put tea bag in, set timer, walk away.
Probably true because if you use a bag to make tea it tastes crap whatever you do with it. :)
Hope he didn’t use pla for the arm, or his brewer might get brewers droop!
It’s a block of plastic holding a servo to which another block of plastic is attached.
3D printed rectangles? Why not just cut pieces out of square stock?
http://hackaday.com/2015/01/28/automated-tea-maker/
But this time it’s different: it uses 3D PRINTED PARTS, and chances are you have one!
Is this a joke?
It must be a joke.
One such project was featured on HaD few months ago, you could select different profiles for different types of tea. There it is : http://hackaday.com/2015/05/21/steeping-tea-perfectly-with-an-arduino/
it’s nice that people are building loads of stuff again.
and i like 3d printers for the possibilities they offer to normal people for fabricating things.
but everything gets huge headlines like this emphasizing the use of the 3D printer,
even though for example in this case basically 3D printed a replacement for a board and a stick.
if you don’t have a 3D printer you’d probably use some plywood and a wooden rod. if you don’t have those: use cardboard and a popsicle stick and nobody will give a f*** about it. but use a 3D printer and you get the headline :-)
somehow i thing the “art” of building things the easy way is lost.
In all fairness to the builder, if he had done it with a Popsicle stick and still used the servo library I’d have probably still written it up.
I was going to mention Popsicle stick…
If I was going to use a 3D printererer, (yeah, right!) I’d give that arm some pizzaz, (e.g. curves, ribs, LEGO knobs…)
Note: you dont have to dunk your tea bag at all. put it in and leave it there. 100% as effective as sitting there agitating it.
yes, and a nice view to watch the diffusion happen.
Real tea drinkers use loose tea in a brew pot and then strain into a pouring pot. I’m enjoying an excellent lapsang souchong right now made the proper way. If I’m forced to use tea bags I generally just have coffee.
A 1 cent teabag (or even 5 cent) is so much cheaper than a cup of coffee.
Well done solving the “problem” of making a brew. I have my own code you can use
10 place twa bag in cup
20 add boiling water
30 stir
40 if tea is not correct strenght goto 30
50 add milk and sugar if required
60 end
There isnt a problem to be solved or an I missing something ?. It’s so easy a chimp could do it.
Correct. It’s very BASIC.
Myself and a friend also made one that we launched to teach kids about using STEM to design things for people with disabilities. Sure, it’s not a super complicated problem to solve, but it’s a good application of a little thing that can improve people’s lives.
https://hackaday.io/project/7206-tea-dunker-stem-steam-project
You misspelled Leer
I’ve built a small device with an ATtiny10 and an CR2032. You press a button and after 4 Minutes it starts to flash some LEDs. That’s enough to make good tea at work.
I would have used a stepper, solely just so it could be named “Steeper Stepper”.
Why people go nuts over this is beyond me. Dunking your tea does nothing, just like several other people are saying. There are even scientific studies out there. Like lab geeks have actually written papers… It’s debunked! The only thing you might be doing is helping to move water through the teabag, which may be filtering part of the tea from diffusing into the rest of the cup, but the bag is meant to be a filter for the bitter oils. SO, if you like bitter tea I guess…
I offer a more simple analog approach. Attach the tea bag to a Drinking Bird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird
My daughter played with our Drinking Bird….
Now I need to fix it…
How come people are perfectly fine with taking the effort to design a 3D model for the mechanics but then are incapable of soldering the circuit together on a piece of veroboard instead of wiring it on a breadboard?
Simple solution:
1. Use a tea pot with an infuser.
2. Weigh 3g of tea per 8oz of water.
3. Put the tea in the infuser with sweetener.
4. Wait the appropriate amount of time for the type of tea you are drinking (use a timer!)
Green Tea 3m
Black Tea 4m
Darjeeling 3m
Herbal 5m
Roobios 10m
5. Enjoy!
6. Also, don’t use crappy tea you have to rip out of bags, get good loose tea!