Brewing Tea Too Stressful? 3D Print A Tea Steeper

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.

29 thoughts on “Brewing Tea Too Stressful? 3D Print A Tea Steeper

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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…

  5. 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!

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