For some folks, tea is a simple pleasure – boil water, steep tea, enjoy. There are those for whom tea is a sacred ritual, though, and the precise temperature control they demand requires only the finest in water heating technology. And then there are those who take things even further by making a PID-controlled electric tea kettle an IoT device with Amazon Echo integration.
Nothing worth doing isn’t worth overdoing, and [luma] scores points for that. Extra points too for prototyping an early iteration of his design on a RadioShack Electronics Learning Lab – the one with a manual written by Forrest Mims. [luma] started out using an Arduino with a Zigbee shield but realized the resulting circuit would have to live in an external enclosure. Switching to an ESP8266, the whole package – including optoisolators, relays, and a small wall-wart – is small enough to fit inside the kettle’s base. The end result is an MQTT device that publishes its status to his SmartThings home automation system, and now responds when he tells Alexa it’s time for tea.
Projects that hack the means of caffeine are no strangers to Hackaday, whether your preferred vector is tea, coffee, or even straight up.
Does it implement rfc7168? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168
Honey should have been included.
What, as in, “Alexa, honey, it’s time for tea”?
I have one of those RadioShack Electronics Learning Labs, and I use it too :p
Does it fill the kettle with freshly drawn water each time, or is your water sitting around in a lime and metal pot gaining taste? That’s the first step, pour out that stale water and fill only a little more than you need. I prefer that it is drained out when finished with. This makes the project kinda null and void.
Ugh! Its just ‘kettle’ – used for boiling water which can then be used for many purposes. I don’t know what this obsession is for limiting your boiling water only for tea (which you should not be doing in a kettle in any case). Sounds like something from the 1800s.
What is this “steeping” you mention?
Are not tea leaves thoroughly soaked in boiling water as long as feasible to leach out every iota of flavor?