/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>592220
Pic plus a timer and a human.
>every goddamn thing has to have a goddamn microcontroller in it
>solution looking for a problem
/thread

>>592220

Basically impossible. You will have to make several prototypes and they wont work properly. You will piss away most of your money making ugly shit buckets over and over that barely work or fail. Now, if you have some existing tested and confirmed good schematics to work from thats another story. From the ground up though? Not snowballs chance in hell.

with arduino you can just solder stuff. probably some basic C knowledge required. mechanical part will be harder

>>592223
This plus a timer, some string and a motor isn't that far off either I guess.

DIY coffee machine....

>>592227
that would be hard to explain to police

>>592228
these days even a toilet is a meth lab...

>>592226
this is propably your best bet
some welded together frame that fits over your teapot, holding an immersion heater with thermostat and this tea infuser dangling from a servo/stepper motor or even something spring powered
should be easy enough

I'd advice against making any such thing unless you're only interested in the crudest, distanced ways of preparing and drinking tea. You'd be better off looking into gongfu and senchado and exploring better ways of making tea. It's much more rewarding.

>>592325
hahahah fucking weeabus get me every time

>>592327
Nothing weeaboo about it, it's just that cultures with a few millennia of tea culture have become rather well at making tea, which is ultimately a culinary process with a lot of variables. An automatic tea maker, especially a home made one, can't emulate a human who can make a proper cup of tea.

>>592248
inb4 this is actually some grandma's candy workshop

>>592325
>hing unless you're only interested in the crudest, distanced ways of preparing and drinking tea. You'd be better off looking into gongfu and senchado and exploring better ways of making tea. It's much more rewarding.

Haha! this guy things china can make a better brew then the british.

Cracks me up this one

>>592333
Pro-tip: If your tea needs milk to make it palatable, you're doing it wrong.

Why would anyone even need to automate such a simple task as making tea? I get it if you're just interested in making a unnecessarily complex machine just for the sake of it, but otherwise it's just stupid. It's completely above me why there would be a market for that product.

>>592220
>It brews loose tea according to a specified program at a specific water temperature then removes the leaves from the tea to prevent over steeping.

Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how every time I get a new coffee/tea contraption I have to figure out how to trick it into making coffee/tea how I like it.

I got a Keurig coffee maker. It's convenient, great, but I don't drink a "cup" of coffee at a time. The minimum is around 1.5 of the machine's maximum brew amount. So I spent the first two weeks with the thing fucking around with how and when I add water and/or open and close the various doors to get it to give me the right amount. I know it's watering the coffee down slightly, but that's ok since I drink it with only a slight amount of sugar and no cream/milk.

This tea machine looks to be $300 worth of pure shit since I drink my tea black and strong. The standard way I make tea is "steep the fuck out of it". This goes well with the fact that I drink mostly black teas which respond well to "boiling fucking hot" water instead of the 180F or so water you need for white and green teas. Also, unless you're a tea aficionado you'll likely not taste the difference between what you can do yourself and what this piece of crap can do. To make tea you put loose tea in a cup and add water. That's it. Tea bags are for when there's nothing else and infusers are just something else that needs washing.

What you should be taking away from this is the perfect cup of coffee or tea has more to do with the monkey operating the machinery, than it does with the machinery.

A machine like that would be super easy to make - a servo, arduino and termistor (maybe an LCD and some buttons). You just have to find out the temperatures and times for different tea sorts.
>>592335
What I learned from Rozen Maiden is that different teas need different temperatures to get the full aroma.

>>592340
>not learning about tea types and temperatures from Haruhi LNs

>>592335

I am somewhat in to expensive teas. There's a difference from dumping a bag of lipton in a cup and just getting another one if your tea tastes like crap vs. paying $50 for some first flush single estate white darjeeling and ruining it b/c your water was too hot or the leaves were in for too long. It's kind of like why people would get a decanting machine even though pouring a glass of wine is a trivial task.

>>592358
arduino.
heating element.
heating element relay.
servo.
servo relay/power control unit
thermistor.
housing + armature to remove infuser
display/interface (buy a Bluetooth module and write a program so you can do it from your cellphone)

not really too difficult if you manually add water and put the tea in the infuser

>make a cube out of a solid sheet of whatever
>drill holes in your cube
>add a string, a little thermometer and a timer

just insert the leaves in the cube and soak it in hot water with temps of your choosing.

Wife and have one of these -- it's only worth it if your time is valuable and you are brewing good teas -hint: no tea you buy at the supermarket is 'good'
that being said, it wouldn't be too hard to get an electric kettle, replace it's control circuits with a microcontroller, and add a servo for infusion at the right time, for the correct duration.
Assuming you plan sufficiently and test your solutions, it would cost around $60-100 in cash and anywhere from 20-100 hours in time.
I don't know about you but my leisure time is limited, and thus valuable to me. Having an automated tea maker saves us about an hour a day. If I value my leisure time really cheap, say $5 hr I hit the break even point in 2 months.

I use a 4 cup coffee maker that I reserve for tea only.
I use a gold foil permanent filter that's never had coffee in it.
I put loose tea (or bags) in the filter, put water appropriate to the amount of tea in the filter and turn it on.
The leaves steep somewhat because of the continuous splashes of hot water over them
Tea is ready in a few minutes.
The maker I have is a Melita basic but one with a timer would allow loading at one time and coming back a another for the tea.
I wouldn't want that for myself because I don't like for the brewed tea to 'cook' on the warming plate.

>put tea leaves in cup
>add water
>drink tea

It can be as simple as that. Why make trouble over nothing?

>>592358
If you're drinking such high end teas you'd get better results making them by hand, preferably with a cupping set for ultimate control.

What would be the best way to raise and lower the basket into an electric kettle? A suspended pulley system? Is there any way to do it with only one motor or servo? I want to eventually make it look nice and would prefer to limit the number of random dangling wires.

>>593129
cotton string wrapped around a pulley on a motor shaft. Just spin the motor for t seconds forward to dunk it and back to raise it. Don't even really need a servo.

>>592334
It's mainly because we drink balls to the wall strong black tea in large quantities, whereas the ching chongs have babby tea in thimbles.

>>593129
like i said earlier, you could try a spring mechanism
Push it down once and it locks in place, until opened by an electronic switch of some sort

>>592220
Microwave: $100
Ingenuitea Teapot: $20
Insulated Mug: $10
Total: $130

>>594228

Hard to control temperature with a microwave or steep time with a teapot but regardless I think I'm close to beating that price plus I'll have web connectivity and voice commands that'd be missing from $100 microwave (because why not?).

rPi(already owned):35
Pi pieces(screen, mic/speakers, power, sd card etc, already owned): 40
Foodsafe Digital Temperature sensor: 15
Motor/assorted wires: 10
Cheap kettle: 10

$110 from scratch, $35 for me

Of course this is still in planning stage. It's entirely possible with my level of electronics experience that I just end up giving the fire department something to do.

>>592220
And now for a different approach-

Instead of removing the leaves from the brew at the designated time, use a 2 chamber design. Top chamber is the steeping chamber. When the steep is done, timer actuated valve opens, tea drains to lower chamber. Lower chamber maintains ideal temp, whatever that is.

Start with a Mr. Coffee. Beef up the top part so it's capacity matches the reservoir capacity. Figure out some valve arrangement to keep the brew from draining into the pot until the timer says ok. Start with a butterfly valve because it's simple. It has to handle weak acids at elevated temperatures, keep that in mind when you're drawing up your specs.

That's my thought, anyhow.

>>594414

This is a really good idea actually. Only thing that gives me pause is keeping the valves sanitary and hacking the coffee machine to match temperatures (the steeping has to be at a particular temperature, not the storage)

>>594566
Yeah. It was kind of off the cuff. Ummm... Valves. In some type of modular removable dealy? Dishwasher safe?

Potentiometer to adjust steep heat? This would have to be dialed in. So, a digital heat gauge might be part of the design. At least the prototype.

>>594930
valves aren't a great solution for tea. I don't see any way to keep them clean. Capillary or pressure valves, both the best choices for food would get tea build up in them.

if you had your glass steeping/heating vessel, and drop a glass tube in it. Seal the top of the vessel and increase pressure from the top, displace most of the tea out of the vessel into a cup... But that's way crazier than just lifting an infuser

>>592691
true, assuming I'm doing nothing else that may distract me during the 5-10 minutes it takes... I'm always doing something.
obviously It's an expensive kitchen doodad. Which means it's way too expensive both in cost and counterspace for what it does... except for a small percent of people, for which it is perfect. My wife and I feel it was/and is a good value. when it wears out, we have spare in storage.

>>594414
missing a critical step... you heat water first to specific temp (different for each tea), then introduce hot water and tea together. after specified time, remove tea from water...
if you heat up tea and water together... you'll get a lot of flavors that you don't want.

>>592225
This is a pretty simple project. The hardest part would be making it look nice.

Maybe look into siphon coffee makers. I think the design would be a good starting point.

>>594937
>tea valve
>keep clean

It's jst water and a little leaf extract. Normal people don't clean their teapots ever. The patina is a mark of pride.