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Rob writes -
Guido knew the secret to a perfect cuppa. It's all in the timing. So he designed a battery-powered tea timer with a built-in LED display that will brew a perfect cup of tea every time. It's simple: just fix a tea-bag on the tea timer's extension arm, place a mug of hot water underneath it and push a button according to how strong you like your tea. The microcontroller-operated, 5V circuit provides a servo motor with control pulses to lower and raise the arm and the power supply is switched off automatically via FET.DIY Tea timer - Link.
I think I saw something similar in Make, maybe back in the first year. I think it was a modded toaster.
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Cool... I did something similar to this a few years ago using an old wind-up alarm clock (the kind with two bells on top). I set the alarm to go off a few minutes after whatever time it happened to be set to and the wind-up knob would turn as the bell rang, which also happened to have the string from the tea bag attached to it with a paperclip so while the alarm rang it was "hoisting" the tea bag out. Obviously, the clock needs to be on a shelf or something higher than the cup so it pulls the bag up and out. Took less time to 'build' than it takes to read this post!
Later, I added enough padding to the bells to make them almost silent. They got annoying since it took awhile to pull the bag all the way out of the water (~10 seconds on my clock), which was way too long to put up with listening to the ringing.
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