“Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
“Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.”
This quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy crosses my mind almost daily, which explains why I’m very much into this automatic tea making tutorial from 24Eng on instructables.
I am scatterbrained. I like to drink hot tea. Oversteeped tea gets bitter. I am easily distracted.
The natural choice was to (over)engineer something with inexpensive hobby-grade electronics. Automatic tea timers are hardly new and people have made them from discarded toasters and K’Nex which I have a lot of respect for. People on this site have been making them with Arduinos and Servos for a long time so I’m hardly the first. This project has three major differences though.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
