Tea Whistle
A simple microcontroller project to make an annoying sound when water is boiling.
Demo recording (YouTube)
Motivation
My mother's tea kettle doesn't have a whistle, so she keeps getting distracted
and accidentally letting it boil over.
This sounds like a problem we can solve with a little bit of Rust and $100 of
Amazon purchases.
Hardware
Where included, links are to the exact products I used.
Required
Bare minimum to replicate the project.
- Arduino Nano or Uno (Amazon)
- Speaker (Amazon)
- DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor(Amazon)
- A single 4.7k Ohm resistor (Amazon)
- Mini USB cable if you don't already have one (Amazon)
Niceties
Not strictly required, but other things I used for assembling the unit.
- Breadboard (Amazon)
- Soldering Iron (I used the PINECIL, currently out of stock)
- Solder (Amazon)
- Screw terminals (Amazon)
- Jumper wires (Amazon)
- Enclosure to hold assembled unit (Amazon)
- AA 6V battery pack (Amazon)
- A round file to make some room for the cables to stick out of the enclosure
- Adhesive to stick the battery pack and speaker to the outside of the enclosure
Physical assembly
In my excitement to assemble the unit I failed to take a decent photo, so here's a tiny cropped frame from a video recording.
- Connect the speaker
- Red wire to a digital (D) pin of your choice (I used D2)
- Black wire to GND (on an Arduino, you'll want to use the one on the same side as the digital pins)
- Connect the temperature sensor
- GND to GND (probably will be a black wire, same one used for the speaker)
- Data to digital pin of your choice (probably will be a yellow wire, I used D3)
- 4.7k Ohm resistor connecting 5V and the digital pin used above, connected between the pin and the sensor data wire
- VCC to 5V (probably a red wire; technically, as a 1-Wire device this can be used in "parasite mode" [Datasheet], but I wouldn't recommend it for this)