So, I drink tea. And by drink, I mean consume. It is at the point that I have a subscription service where sencha green tea is regularly delivered to my house. But do I stop there? No way! In the pursuit of the perfect cup, I have gone to the depths of measuring out the leaves by weight and even ensuring water temp is what I find optimal. However, to do this, I needed a tech solution. Enter Tea Sense!
Basics
Basically, it’s a way for me to alert myself when the water reaches 80 C, which is what I find is the optimal tea temperature. An apparatus was built up using Arduino, an RTD, and a little bit of elbow grease. The result is shown below:
Originally, this was Raspberry Pi Zero W based. However, it seemed like overkill and, given their recent political positions, decided to take it towards a different route. Thus, the usage of an Arduino Uno rev 4 WiFi. It provided the best part of both worlds. Also, I support the Open Source movement in the process.
That was the easy part!
Operation
The RTD will continuously read the temperature. Once it reaches 78 C, it will send out an alert. The alerting is simple. I have a Twilio account and phone number. The Arduino will when activated send through the RESTful API a message to the Twilio endpoint telling with the “♨️” emoji to my mobile number. This goes out every minute until the sensor has cooled down. And there you have it! Tea Sense!