Teabag

In the movie Wall-E, future humans live in floating chairs and have everything done for them. Today, we grumble if we have to go to physically find a light switch or a remote control. How far away can floating chairs with screens be? T2, the Tea Bot, gets us one step closer to that. Using a laser-cut frame, an ESP8266, and a servo motor, the T2 brews your tea for exactly the right amount of time.

We were kind of hoping the robot would at least dunk the tea bag in and out, but it does provide a web interface that lets you select the brew. Of course, the code is available, so you could make modifications — maybe turn on a hotplate underneath the cup.

Continue reading “Tea Bot Solves Another First World Problem” →

For some of those who are aficionados of the drink, tea making can be serious business. For them, strong, black, leaf tea left for ages to stew in a stained teapot that would strip the hairs off your chest (like it should be made) just won’t do. These beverage anarchists demand a preparation process of careful temperature regulation and timing, and for some reason repeatedly dunking a teabag in the water.

For them, [Dorian Damon] has an automated solution to getting the crucial dunking process right. He’s made an automatic tea bag dunker. The teabag is mounted on a slide operated by a crank, and the crank is driven through a pair of bicycle hubs. Motive power comes from a mains shaded-pole motor, an unusual bi-directional one of which he only uses one side. He measured his personal dunking rate at about 50 per minute, so he only needed a 4:1 reduction to match the motor at 200 RPM.

The resulting machine will happily dunk his tea bag at that rate for as long as it’s left switched on. He’s put a few videos up, of which we’ve posted one below the break.

Continue reading “Tea Making The Mechanical Way” →