It hurts our aged soul to think how many of you won’t know what a teasmade is. So here is a quick overview of this classic 20th-century technology. Now we will tell you how VEEB brought such a contraption back to life with Raspberry Pi.
Yeah, we love the project video as much as you do. The clattering trolley rolling in with this ancient tea-making machine on top. Then loudly making a Google calendar note to brew the tea for you while you do something more useful. Genius.
Look how cute we look stuck on the side of a Teasmade
How does it work?
Raspberry Pi reads your Google calendar and automatically activates the kettle ten minutes before the time when you’ve said you want a coffee.
Then it gets super noisy. Teasmades are like that. But it’s worth it, trust me. To cover the sound of the janky old machine, VEEB has added a speaker that plays God save the Queen as the water heats up and pours into the clever dripper with the coffee filter in it. I’m not sure there is anything more English than that, other than if this project actually made tea and not coffee. I think coffee belongs to Seattle, but I’m not sure Seattle has a national anthem of its own. Correct me in the comments. Maybe Nirvana?
You have to log that brew time
Anywho, then you sprinkle your coffee grounds into the hot water, give it a stir with a spoon, and hey presto, you have [kind of automatically brewed] coffee!
File this in the list of projects we love because engineers like to spend several hours building something to automate an activity that takes one second. In this case, switching on a kettle to boil water for your coffee.
A quick PSA to share with those not in the know the wonder that is the limited television series Father Ted. The Mrs Doyle character was infamous for her fervent insistence on making everyone a cup of tea and she was crushed when her parochial employer, Father Ted, gave her a Teasmade for Christmas to take the “misery” out of making tea. It is not a miserable task. It is a calming, soothing ritual. Stupid Father Ted.
If you want to watch the whole episode, it’s the 1996 Christmas special
Following on from Rob Zwetsloot’s Haunted House Hacks in the latest issue of The MagPi magazine, GitHub’s Martin Woodward has created a spooky pumpkin that warns you about the thing programmers find scariest of all — broken builds. Here’s his guest post describing the project:
“When you are browsing code looking for open source projects, seeing a nice green passing build badge in the ReadMe file lets you know everything is working with the latest version of that project. As a programmer you really don’t want to accidentally commit bad code, which is why we often set up continuous integration builds that constantly check the latest code in our project.”
“I decided to create a 3D-printed pumpkin that would hold a Raspberry Pi Zero with an RGB LED pHat on top to show me the status of my build for Halloween. All the code is available on GitHub alongside the 3D printing models which are also available on Thingiverse.”
Components
Raspberry Pi Zero (I went for the WH version to save me soldering on the header pins)
Unicorn pHat from Pimoroni
Panel mount micro-USB extension
M2.5 hardware for mounting (screws, male PCB standoffs, and threaded inserts)
“For the 3D prints, I used a glow-in-the-dark PLA filament for the main body and Pi holder, along with a dark green PLA filament for the top plug.”
“I’ve been using M2.5 threaded inserts quite a bit when printing parts to fit a Raspberry Pi, as it allows you to simply design a small hole in your model and then you push the brass thread into the gap with your soldering iron to melt it securely into place ready for screwing in your device.”
Threaded insert
“Once the inserts are in, you can screw the Raspberry Pi Zero into place using some brass PCB stand-offs, place the Unicorn pHAT onto the GPIO ports, and then screw that down.”
pHAT install
“Then you screw in the panel-mounted USB extension into the back of the pumpkin, connect it to the Raspberry Pi, and snap the Raspberry Pi holder into place in the bottom of your pumpkin.”
Inserting the base
Code along with Martin
“Now you are ready to install the software. You can get the latest version from my PumpkinPi project on GitHub. “
“Format the micro SD Card and install Raspberry Pi OS Lite. Rather than plugging in a keyboard and monitor, you probably want to do a headless install, configuring SSH and WiFi by dropping an ssh file and a wpa_supplicant.conf file onto the root of the SD card after copying over the Raspbian files.”
“You’ll need to install the Unicorn HAT software, but they have a cool one-line installer that takes care of all the dependencies including Python and Git.”
# How often to check (in seconds). Remember - be nice to the server. Once every 5 minutes is plenty.
REFRESH_INTERVAL = 300
“Finally you can run the script as root:”
sudo python ~/PumpkinPi/src/pumpkinpi.py &
“Once you are happy everything is running how you want, don’t forget you can run the script at boot time. The easiest way to do this is to use crontab. See this cool video from Estefannie to learn more. But basically you do sudo crontab -e then add the following:”
“Note that we are pausing for 10 seconds before running the Python script. This is to allow the WiFi network to connect before we check on the state of our build.”
“The current version of the pumpkinpi script works with all the SVG files produced by the major hosted build providers, including GitHub Actions, which is free for open source projects. But if you want to improve the code in any way, I’m definitely accepting pull requests on it.”
“Using the same hardware you could monitor lots of different things, such as when someone posts on Twitter, what the weather will be tomorrow, or maybe just code your own unique multi-coloured display that you can leave flickering in your window.”
“If you build this project or create your own pumpkin display, I’d love to see pictures. You can find me on Twitter @martinwoodward and on GitHub.”
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