This project aims to create an opensource automated tea maker. The design should be simple to reproduce and modify by others.
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The idea behind this project is to automate the process of making tea as much as possible.
I have seen a few tea makers out there but most of them are still quite manual. This machine will dispense a tea bag into the cup, fill one cup of water into the kettle and boil it. Once the water is boiled it will be dispensed into the cup.
The only manual part is loading up many tea bags and then removing the tea bag once the water is poured.
I have played with a few different designs for dispensing tea. Some were using an auger screw to dispense tea leaves. I left the tea leaf design because I had a lot of trouble with it jamming. Tea bags are a more popular option for most people so I decided to make a design that works for that.
This module will be a standalone from the rest of the tea machine. I will probably have it controlled by its own microcontroller. I would like to have the microcontroller interface with the rest of the machine using some communication protocol (I2C, UART or other). So any other module can request for a bag to be dropped.
It consists of a continuous rotation servo that revolves a slotted cylinder. There are 10 slots which hold hold up to 9 tea bags.
There is a gap the size of the one slot on the base cylinder of the slotted cylinder. When a tea bag in a slot aligns with that slot in the base, the tea bag will fall through the slot. Thereby dispensing a single bag.
There is a light sensor and an LED by the slot where the tea bag falls through. When a tea bag falls through it will break the beam of light and indicate that a tea bag has been dispensed.
As a module this can accept a command to DROP which starts moving the servo. Once a bag has fallen then the module will issue a SIGNAL to indicate that it has completed its operation of dispensing a tea bag. There is also a TIMEOUT command that will be issued by this module if it rotates for long enough and no tea bag has fallen. The TIMEOUT command will either indicate a mechanical fault or that the dispenser has run out of bags.
Brandon Piner
Tomasz
Chris Hamilton
AVR