I have this extra-curricular project I’m working on this term. While I was waiting for details to firm up and parts to arrive, I thought I’d see if I still had the chops to build and program an actual machine. So I dug out the Lego Mindstorms and set about making a machine to help me make a perfect cup of tea, even if I forget to remove the teabag for hours (which, sadly, is a real problem for me).
I spent a while reacquainting myself with the hardware, built the robot, then dug into the programming.
The software for programming the Lego Mindstorms kits was written for Windows, but it was quickly reverse-engineered and improved by the hacker community. I prefer something called Not Quite C, or NQC, by one Dave Baum. Sadly, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while and I had a lot of trouble getting it to run on the house Macs. I eventually got it working on our oldest machine, wrote the code, downloaded it into the robot, and it worked. Yay!
Building the robot consumed an afternoon. Getting NQC working consumed a couple of days. Writing and testing the code took another afternoon and evening. I’ve been using it for over a week now and it’s great! Anna lets me keep it in the kitchen. She thinks I’m amusing.
Here’s a video I put together this evening, which was another struggle with old software. For some reason Apple decided to dumb down iMovie about the time we got our Mac mini, and it wouldn’t accept the video file from my camera. Eventually I learned that there was so much outcry about this that Apple re-released the previous version for free download, only to remove it from their site when the next version came out.
However, the Internet being what it is, I was able to find a copy somewhere else and install it. I’ve never used any version of iMovie before, and it was really pretty easy to throw this together.
You’ll probably want to right-click on the following link and copy it to your own computer, so you can open it in your QuickTime player. It’s about 10mb in size.
If anyone wants it, I can send you the source code. Let me know. It’s pretty basic.
Hidden feature: the body can be moved up and down on the legs, to adjust to the height of your teacups.
Major drawback: the robot is battery powered. When I swap the batteries for fresh ones, it forgets the program and I have to boot up the old iMac and upload the program again.
Bonus feature: the tea-infuser ball gizmo I got for Christmas works with it. I can load it up with loose tea, hang it on the dunking arm, and come back to a perfect cup of, say, chai rooibos.
Next upgrade: an alligator clip on a string, so I can use it with teabags that don’t have strings, like my beloved PG Tips.
Not planned: a user interface for choosing steep times, dunking frequency, or the song that plays upon completion. Such things do not belong on a kitchen appliance.
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