Tea Blog

Teamakers are becoming rather common these days, and there are some models that are quite elaborate, automating nearly every step of the teamaking process and then taking the dog for a walk when they’re finished. I’ve used a number of these gizmos over the years, and they’re quite fine, but I always seem to find myself drifting back to less elaborate methods of preparing tea.

But while I can see the sense of using one of these gadgets, I don’t have any desire to build my own. Apparently, there are those who do harbor such a desire, and presumably it all has to do with the rise of the so-called maker culture in recent years.

So if making your own teamaker is the kind of thing that might grab you, march forth to the Instructables site to check out this article. It promises to show you how to make something called the ATTiny Tea Maker, which shouldn’t cost you more than twenty dollars before it’s all said and done.

One starts by creating the circuit that will serve as the brains of the thing, then going on to building the framework, assembling and finishing it all. It seems like a lot of a work to build a very basic teamaker, but as someone who used to pore over Heathkit’s extensive catalogs of DIY electronics projects I guess I can relate, to some extent.

For an even more basic variation on this same theme take a look at this Instructables article about the Little Tea robotic tea brewer. It’s nothing fancy and as you can see from the accompanying photos its made with cardboard and a popsicle stick, among other things. But it you’re clever and ambitious enough to make this plain Jane model, I suspect that you can probably come up with a way to make it a bit more stylish. As for the mechanics of the thing, it appears that its primary objective is to remove the teabag from the cup at the appointed time. Not terribly elaborate, but there it is.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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