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Archive for the ‘3d printed tea maker’ Category

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.


Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Arduino Hacks

While most of us here at Hack a Day can’t live without our daily java, we do understand and respect the tea drinking hackers out there, like [Brian McEvoy] the 24 Hour Engineer. Like any self-respecting hacker, [Brian] seeks to improve the efficiency of day-to-day tasks in order to spend his time on things that really matter — so he decided to automate his tea cup.

He’s 3D printed a small tea-bagging mechanism that a littleĀ RC servo motor can actuate, which allows him to control the amount of time a tea bag spends steeping in his mug. Another 3D printed enclosure includes the Arduino, a few buttons, and an LCD screen to allow you to select the steeping time for your favorite herb. In fact, the majority of this project is 3D printed which means the majority of the cost comes from the minimal electronics required — stuff you probably already have lying around. He’s also included all the design files you need in order to make your own.

The project has been in process for a while, but he’s finally finished it off, and it works great. If you’re hungry for some of the nitty-gritty build logs and troubleshooting a long the way, he’s got a whole bunch of blog posts from throughout the process.

It’s pretty similar in function to this automated tea maker we shared earlier this year, but we love how they took completely different approaches to solving the problem of a perfectly timed steep. Mind you, they both used an Arduino — but can you really blame them?


Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Arduino Hacks


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