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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
