Man Spends 11 Hours Tweeting About Trying to Make a Cuppa With Wi-Fi Kettle
Peter Donnell / 8 years ago
Have you ever had one of those mornings, where you absolutely need a nice cup of tea, but you can’t be bothered to get up and flick the switch to boil the water? Then get a Wi-Fi enabled kettle that you can turn on from your phone! Just… proceed with caution, as it may not be so simple.
Mark Rittman, a data specialist from Hove, England, wanted to try out his new Wi-Fi kettle at 9am, little did he know that it would be 11 hours before he got the damn thing to work.
https://twitter.com/markrittman/status/785751015517814784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
After three hours, the actual kettle was refusing to connect to its own base, making it impossible to turn it on remotely.
3 hrs later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base-station reset, now port-scanning network to find where kettle is now. pic.twitter.com/TRQLuLzLpx
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Now the Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT integration with Amazon Echo pic.twitter.com/ryd42c5ewj
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Now my wifi kettle is basically taking the p*ss. Told me it had found network, now you need to recalibrate me, oh btw I didn't rly connect pic.twitter.com/WbGsIrzBio
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Of course, he wasn’t simply trying to boil it, as he wanted it integrated to other smart devices in his home, such as Siri and Amazon Echo. Being a software engineer, he set about adding this function to the device.
It is, and OK apart from flaky WiFi connectivity; main issue is that there's no IFTTT or HomeKit integration, so hacked that together myself https://t.co/0IjD7q4wzM
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Well the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we're eating dinner in dark while lights download a firmware update pic.twitter.com/yPTDoUkM9Z
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
My work is done. And now onto everything else I meant to do today, after that first cup of tea. pic.twitter.com/bJPuJ85TCT
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
That’s quite an adventure Mark, and credit to you for putting up with the damn thing for so long. I love great tech, but when a home kettle takes longer to boil than those awful ones you find in budget hotels, it’s really not that great.
