Malcolm Splendiff's 1974 Goblin Teasmade Gets a 21st Century Upgrade, Thanks to a Raspberry Pi
Scanning for keywords in Google Calendar, this Teasmade gets your tea or coffee ready right on schedule.
Maker Malcolm Splendiff has used a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless single-board computer to bring a 1970s Goblin Teasmade into the 21st century — by linking its operation to his Google Calendar schedule.
Designed by William Hermann Brenner Thornton in 1934, building on earlier work dating back to 1891 and Charles Maynard Walker's "Early Riser's Friend,", the Goblin Teasmade is an alarm clock with a difference: As well as waking you with some sound, it brews you a fresh pot of tea or coffee to start your day off right.
Simply setting the analog alarm clock on the Teasmade's front, though, is a little too retro for many - including Splendiff, who decided to connect his 1974 variant to the internet using a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.
"It is just a couple of switches and an alarm clock," Splendiff explains of the Teasmade he inherited and used as the base for the project, "so I just needed to bypass the alarm with a relay and it's under the [Raspberry] Pi's control."
"The motivation for building this, is a simple proof-of-concept for using a ring-fenced online resource to trigger device (not Teasmade) - automation. It's possible to use home automation controls without signing-up to have a listening device constantly plugged into the cloud. If Edward Snowden had an automated tea/coffee machine, it would be this one, probably."
The heart of the project is a Python script which searches through a Google Calendar for an entry with "brew time" - or any other user-chosen trigger. "The code scans your chosen Gmail calendar once a minute and checks 'Is there a matching slot in the next 8 minutes (this is how long the Teasmade takes to boil)," Splendiff says.
"If it sees a calendar slot with the trigger word(s) (in config.yaml) in the title, the relay switch closes (which just mimics the Teasmade alarm being activated) and the tea begins to brew. Once the 8 minutes has passed, the alarm plays (we use the British National anthem)."
Splendiff has published the source code for the project, which he notes can be easily adapted to any other device controllable via relay, on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.