“Utah! Get me two!”

TL;DR: Rounding out the parts list; stripboard to solder everything onto, switches for safety features and controlling the lamp, a capacitive sensor to wake the clock screen and MOSFETs to control the currents that the Arduino can’t directly. Electricity is dangerous.

This isn’t the most universally entertaining post, it’s quite technical. The next post will be more creative talking about the blog itself and going momentarily off the narrative of building the clock. For this post there’s levity injected where possible but that’s not so regular, as you can assume by this disclaimer: I don’t recommend trying this project. This is not an instruction manual or reference material for electrical work, I am a very inexperienced engineer writing (believe it or not) with the intention of being entertaining, at least to myself. Assume everything I write – especially about health and safety – to be completely subjective and even more-so completely incomplete. For example, I conclude 12V is probably harmless; that means 12V DC, through my skin, while dry, at room temperature and for less than a few seconds. All of that is far too mundane to include in a blog that is already fighting against by abilities as a writer (or lack thereof) to be entertaining. Stay alive.
For the uninitiated, the footnote* (foot-essay) might be worth reading first – only the first bit about why wires might get hot though.

The basic parts list is now done; cartridge heater, LEDs, copper wire, clock, LCD. However, there’s a few more bits to add, mostly as a result of working with the fairly substantial 60W power supply. Given the supply provides 12V, my highly resistive skin should provide me with all the protection I need to avoid electricity induced burns or muscle contractions. While my skin is highly resistive, all sorts of things effect that, wet skin that has had a potential difference held across it for a long time (e.g. if I’ve just come back from the bathroom and am absent-mindedly holding wires while I try to regain my bearings) can start to accept a lot more current than it ought to. Essentially, electricity preys on fear; every bead of sweat that coats your hand makes it easier for the energy in one wire to make its way to the other by forming a path of destruction through your skin, nerves and muscles. Every second you hesitate, it breaks down your skins defences, bending your body to its will until your natural defences are overcome. Electricity pursues its mission to go from high potential to low potential with the type of tenacity and ruthlessness that extreme capitalist culture encourages people with a lack of empathy to pursue the opposite path – from low to high potential. As far as electricity is concerned the only difference between a path and a roadblock is time.

Lightning isn’t so much just a matter of time as the potential difference between the clouds and ground is actually getting higher. However, if there was a somehow lightning bolt shaped path of especially humid air, it’s definitely more likely to see a strike, similar to wet hands – more water means lower resistance (in these cases). Pretty similar concept to when things short circuit if you spill water on them too. Photo by luiisrtz on Pexels.com

Still, substantial current through me is unlikely, but if I drop a screwdriver which lands on some wires, current might flow through it and it can quite quickly get hot enough to burn me as I try to pick it up, then I’ll recoil as if in fear of this possessed screwdriver pursuing a further attack. It’s that recoiling that can lead to me hitting my head on the table or slamming my hand on a drill bit or something hot. I know that sounds like the conjecture of an overprotective mother but you learn very quickly working with electricity that these fears are well-founded.
The tidiest workshops you’ll see are those concerned with electrical equipment, the electricity supply in such workshops (not in your house or garage) is fairly safe with so much in the way of safety switches and fuses but it will still shock you. Its your knee jerk reaction that’s dangerous – a quickly retracted arm is a prime target for the exposed blade left lying around after stripping wires. Or perhaps a flailing leg is the mechanism by which the acid, imprisoned in a testing jar against its will for too long, makes good its escape. These risks are very real and make one appreciate a tidy workspace. It is wise, then, for me to keep track of where things are and where they should be, but also to buy a few switches, allowing me to turn the supply off without unplugging it every time and, more importantly, without being close to the plug. I’ll just need to make sure I know very well which side of the switch I’m working on at all times.
The switches will also find use in the end product, one to allow me to turn the light on and off like a normal lamp. Another as a sort of disconnector for the heating system as the heater says it’s comfortable operating at 350 degrees Celsius. That’s fine for the heater but everything around it, including me, would be very uncomfortable if it got anywhere near that. So I’ll need a kill switch to keep it in line in case the innate pyromaniacal tendencies ever take over. My main concern is the brains of the operation, the Arduino, coercing the heater into some sort of suicide pact while I’m not around, or teasing it, saying “I bet you can’t really get that hot”. So to prevent this I’ll put the heater into isolation from the rest of the circuit by flicking a switch as I pick up my morning cuppa and reconnect it when I set a new cup on at night. I agree; isolating the innocent, naïve party is the wrong approach entirely, the heater would never turn itself on if left unprovoked by the Arduino – the bad influence should be the one that suffers social isolation all day. Unfortunately though, reprimanding the Arduino will only lead to the rest of the students – I mean components – acting out. It’s the coward’s way out for sure but thankfully the heater doesn’t have the mental capacity to be instilled with trauma from this dreadful mistreatment. A mistreatment which only serves to accommodate the obviously emotionally incompetent and lazy teachers – I mean technically incompetent and lazy me – who can’t be bothered to work out an alternative. This of course wouldn’t be a bothersome thing to work out for a more competent engineer. So the real root of the problem clearly lies in the training processes completed by the people charged with the care of these children – I mean person charged with making this clock.
If I was to detail the problem more literally – the Arduino might turn the heater on due to a bug in my code or an unplanned clock reset. If there’s no cup to heat, there’s no telling where that enormous amount of heat energy will get redirected to – my fingers, though, trembling with trepidation almost to the point of forgetting they’ve got a job to do in typing right now, seem to think that they’re a prime target for getting cooked.

I’ll use a stripboard to link all components together – not much to say about that, it’s just a lot of strips of copper on a board that I can solder things to, making a circuit. They come with good current ratings so I can avoid anything getting hot.

Switches are fine for most things but to wake the LCD screen and request it to display the time, I think a touch sensitive button would be pretty sleek. I have an old phone which pretty much every part of has perished and figured the onboard fingerprint sensor could do the job, so I set about taking the phone apart, brutally ripping off its already busted screen and leaving my bedroom floor looking like the 33rd floor of Nakatomi Plaza in the process. Heartbreakingly, the sensor had special connections that I couldn’t make use of. Which I most certainly could have just found out using Google.
Thankfully touch sensors are fairly easy to make from pretty much any sheet of metal and a resistor. One of the heat sinks in the phone is a perfectly sized sheet of copper to make a button out of, so the John McClane cosplay wasn’t completely in vain.

A touch sensor (the blue wire and everything to the right of it). Quickly prototyped on a breadboard using a steel soldering iron rest as the “button”. The bigger the metal sheet used, the more sensitive the button is – in this case I could just hover my hand near it and still be sensed.

Lastly but probably most importantly, we need to return to that whole Arduino being a bit of a manipulative bully analogy from earlier to understand why I need MOSFETs – that’s an acronym, I’m not just super excited to talk about these special transistors, I am a little excited, though. During uni I’ve looked into pretty much every analogy to try and understand a transistor’s inner workings; the interesting ones don’t explain it well and the ones that explain it well aren’t interesting, so I’ll spare you any attempt at describing it. The outer workings are pretty intuitive though – basically, the heater draws just over 4 Amps while (hopefully) boiling water, but the Arduino is unwilling to give it any more than about a tenth of that for fear of morphing into a heater itself and everything getting a bit melty (noticing a theme?*). To get around this, the Arduino can delegate the supply of current to the heater to a MOSFET, which is more than capable of commanding 4 Amps, but not without explicit commands to do so. Whereas before the Arduino would have had to push with everything it had and more to get the heater to even think about doing its job, it can now simply wave its hand to the newly appointed and very obliging enforcer which will wrangle the heater into compliance. MOSFETs, and all transistors, are basically switches that machines can control. So the heater will have its own direct line to every bit of power that the Arduino has access to but the MOSFET controls whether that line is in use or not, and the Arduino decides what the MOSFET decides, and I decide what the Arduino decides, and . . .
I also think I’ll use a MOSFET to control the LED, it’s not really necessary here – I could wire it differently but incorporating the switch that allows the use of the LED as a regular lamp outside of sunrise hours gets slightly more involved and MOSFETs come in packs of 10 anyway. Pretty much everything I’ve mentioned on this shopping list has had to be bought in a pack of at least two which should be great for experimenting.
Other than that, a few wires, a roll of tape and some solder will be needed but as best as I can make out the shopping list is complete for now!
I’m not sure if I’ll actually write about this but I’ll also buy a few smaller LEDs and a breadboard which can be great for verifying the code works without getting a 12V supply and 50W heater involved.

A simple circuit using a MOSFET – the silver thing with a hole in it. All this circuit did was turn the bulb on and off. The silver holed part is actually just a heat sink, the magic happens in the black casing,. The fact that these come with a means to get rid of heat quickly should confirm that these little things can wield some serious power.

* A note on electricity and heat: People often think live wires are thermally hot – they shouldn’t be. The wire getting hot means it is giving off power as heat – where is it getting that power? It’s stealing from the power you have tasked it with carrying to your phone’s battery.
If a wire has a limited number of electrons, (the particles tasked with carrying electrical current) attempting to transfer large currents means the electrons are overworked and start making mistakes, bumping into each other and generally getting all hot and bothered. The more this happens the more they hit each other and the more temper(ature)s flare. So it’s very important to ensure your wire has enough electrons to carry the current you’re trying to send through it, otherwise they’ll waste so much of it bumping into one another that the majority of your power has been given off as heat before it gets the chance to reach whatever you were trying to power. Thankfully the solution is simple, just employ more electrons – use a thicker wire, split the current between two wires or use a better conductor (with more free electrons per unit volume). There’s other ways too.
The wires in the Arduino can carry 2 Amps without getting hot, above this they heat up and start melting the plastic board they’re embedded in.

I suspect no-one will be reading at this point – I’m about to tackle why touching live wires burns, even if the wire itself isn’t (thermally) hot – “hot” can also mean live when dealing with electricity. Honestly it’s only worth reading if you’re really interested, I’m mainly writing to improve my own understanding of it, I’ll still try to make it readable but it will be devoid of figurative language. Again – this is incomplete and quite possibly inaccurate!!
If you put current through something resistive it will dissipate heat power to the tune of I²R; the current through it squared, multiplied by its resistance. Clearly if you’re using a high current then you need a very low resistance to avoid too much heat being dissipated. Also, voltage is equal to the current multiplied by resistance (V=IR for the acquainted). Voltage is the thing to watch out for primarily – also called potential difference as it represents the electrical potential between two points. A 12V DC supply like I’m using will have 12V of electrical potential between the red and black wires, if I were to grab both with one hand and my skin had resistance of 100,000 ohms, the current would be 0.00012 Amps through my skin. So referring back to the previous formula, 0.00012² x 100,000 = 0.00144 Watts of heat is dissipated by my hand – that’s just over the power my Wi-Fi router antenna emits – and I can hold that all day without getting warm. The FCC makes sure of that.
At higher voltages the heat dissipated by my hand will increase, the wire isn’t getting hot, I am. The maths for working out where real burning would occur is maybe a little beyond me and honestly pretty pointless since there is always the danger of something other than my hand coming between both wires and getting hotter than my hand would, coupled with the danger of me touching that something. Also, at a certain point, skin starts to get broken down because of electrical potential across it, causing its resistance to drop and allowing more current to flow – trying to factor this in is pretty much pointless as there are too many variables that will change every time you work – “have I showered yet today?” and “what did I have for lunch?”
Also important is that long before burning actually occurs, other dangers will get to me, our brain communicates using minute electrical signals and so our pain receptors are fantastic at detecting electrical current, so while I may not be burning, I will be feeling tremendous amounts of pain. Muscles also begin to be overwhelmed by electrical signals and start convulsing, particularly troublesome around the lungs and heart. Although, humans being the fantastic race we are have developed life-saving defibrillators based on this principal to kickstart the heart with a big current induced contraction.
Also also important is that mains supply and a huge amount of what you are likely to encounter is AC, not DC, which is something I shan’t go into except to say that AC doesn’t find your skin’s resistance to be so much of an issue.
Electricity is very dangerous. Taking advice from strangers on the internet is very dangerous. Inferring advice from an entertainment-driven blog is very dangerous. Inferring electricity-related advice from a stranger’s entertainment-driven blog on the internet is very very very dangerous.

25th Jun 2020 0

Making up for Lost Time

TL;DR: I have some LEDs in mind for the sunrise, Arduino clocks are inaccurate in the long term so I need a separate module to keep time, an LCD screen will also be used to display the time when I request it to do so.

With the tea-making aspect sorted next up to tackle is the LED sunrise feature. Sunrises are one of the few things I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I love. I lived as a stranger in England for a while, with absolutely nothing and nobody to answer to outside of office hours except myself. I was on a fair wage and had a car which basically means I could do whatever I wanted – so what do I want?
I feel I might write about this properly in future but, briefly, I was at a loss while in England, a complete stranger with very little to occupy myself with in the evenings. So I shifted my circadian rhythm back an hour or two, this way I had exactly enough time to do what I needed to do in the evening after work and go straight to bed. The spare time in the morning was much easier to occupy as a lonely soul than the late evening. I would leave for work early and stop at a fishing spot on the River Trent to watch the sunrise. I think this shifting of my free time is why I had such a productive summer. Sitting there as the day began encouraged me to focus on the future, a full day of potential was on its way and I had the time to plan out how I was going to seize every opportunity before the problems of the day even had a chance to think about me. Free time in the evening encourages reflection on the day past which is of course also very useful but I think a surplus of free time, the like of which I had, is best placed at the start of the day. Placing it in the evening might develop into futile obsessing over how I shouldn’t have spent an hour scrolling through Facebook, placing it in the morning means I can spend more time planning how I’m going to avoid doing the same thing that day, based on how I’m actually feeling that day.

The sun, well into its rise over the River Trent, taken before my last day working in England. You’ll notice most photos of “sunrises” I have are at least a little while after the actual rising – the photo never does it justice anyway so I’d rather just enjoy the best moments as they occur and take a photo for future reference afterward. The photo is more as a reminder of how amazing it was a few minutes before the photo.

At weekends I would do something similar, I’d set my alarm for 4 am or earlier and drive for miles to watch the sunrise in some beautiful patch of the Peak District, spend the day walking until I was exhausted enough to sleep when I got home and do exactly that.
A sunrise in the Peak District is truly spectacular. You can visit it during the day and be absolutely stunned by the harmonious contrast of the limestone faces and grassy hills as well as the odd water feature effortlessly flowing through the channel that its been so carefully sculpting for itself over the centuries.
The water in the Peaks somehow seems more fluid than normal, as if it is free of eddy currents and impervious to all obstacles and external forces. You know that feeling where you think there’s one more step than there actually is? As your foot falls the absence of an obstacle is baffling and terrifying as you readjust your momentum to avoid falling. Isolate that very first moment, before fear sets in, you’re belief that a stair is there is still not quite shaken despite feeling its absence, perhaps you have ascended. Obstacles you know are in your way no longer have any effect on you, your foot just continues on its path downwards, untroubled by the rules of the world that everyone else has to adhere to – not you, not now. That’s how I imagine the rivers and streams in the Peak District flow, with a supernatural sense of absolute fluidity, every movement exactly as intended, never hindered or impeded by the rules that every other being and non-being follows. Except, for the water, that sensation isn’t followed by a rush of fear as we realise we were wrong, the rules of the world still very much apply to us, the world just isn’t as we pictured it – and it might be about to get a lot more hostile in the form of a nasty fall if we don’t return to following the rules immediately. For the rivers of the Peaks, this feeling of moving unencumbered isn’t followed by anything – that’s their entire state of being. So visit the Peak District and marvel at these superfluid bodies yourself. But before you go, know that visiting in the day you only see one shade of everything, arrive for the sunrise and you can view the infinite permutations that each perfectly formed piece of the landscape goes through as it approaches its resting shade of splendour.

A few sunrises from the Dovedale, Thorpe and Ladybower patches of the Peak District.

I could write a lot more about my love for watching the sunrise but given that I’m talking about recreating it with an LED I feel like the more I describe the beauty of what it is simulating, the more I prime myself to resent the end-product. There’s little to say about the LEDs, they’re warm white cooker hood bulbs and I have four of them, I only intend on using one, two if necessary.

You may think the title refers to what I said about moving my free time around, it doesn’t. It’s actually the fact that not all clocks are created equal. The onboard clock of the Arduino loses about two seconds every hour – not good for an alarm clock. To make up for that lost time I’d have to take the lid off and reset things at least once a week which does not appeal to me at all. I feel like if I start to write about the concept of “losing seconds” here I’ll quickly stop making sense so I’ll leave my views on the subjectivity of time passing for something that lends itself to talking about it at a higher level of abstraction sometime. For now, just know that it means I need to order a separate clock to keep time and an LCD screen to display the time, I’ve worked with the DS3231 clock module before so I’ll buy that. It also has an onboard temperature sensor which might be useful if I have concerns about the temperature being reached inside the casing – hopefully not. This module might need reset every now and then as it forgets to count a second here and there but not nearly as often as once a week.

21st Jun 2020 0

Mastering Entropy

TL;DR: I’m using a relatively low powered cartridge heater to heat the water so that it can use the same power supply as the Arduino. For aesthetics it will be inserted into a sort of electric hob style spiral set up made from copper.

I said previously that some part of my brain had sketched a parts list for this project, however, now that I sit down to materialise that into an order form, it is becoming clear that it skimped on the details. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that a heater, a light and an Uno board does not constitute a parts list for this project. Finding a suitable heater is tricky, thankfully, as I mentioned in my last post, I’m interested in 3D printers.
There was a mild interest before with my uninspired Arduino build but this year at uni I had the pleasure of working to prototype some sensors and anytime something I needed didn’t exist I would just go home, design it and send it to the technician, the next day it would be sitting in a bag with my name on it. Completely bespoke, a perfect solution. Or at least perfect within the confines of my designing capabilities. I defy anyone to not be completely spellbound by 3D printers after having used them to do something genuinely useful. Imagine a world without compromise – if something is too big or too soft or too red, you can just tell this machine to make you a smaller, harder, bluer version. And it will . . . Madness. This obsession will no doubt lead me to buy one and Amazon is keen to be in on the action. I’ll go shopping for a first aid kit and the screen will contain the absolute minimum amount of medical supplies that it knows I’ll tolerate, the rest being a mosaic tile arrangement of: 3D printer parts at low low prices; stylish coffee makers crafted from exotic looking wood and shiny metal; and books that promise they’ll help me get my life together. Amazon really does know me, and now, so do you.
Thankfully one of these printer parts is the heater used to melt the printing material, which I think looks about perfect for heating a single cup of water.

Simply dipping it into the cup as an immersion heater would never suffice though, far too inelegant. Plus, as any Irish person will know, there is a horrible stigma around the use of an immersion heater – the cause of many’s a family argument:
“Who turned the immersion heater on/off?!!”
“The water from the central heating is plenty warm!”
“The shower ran Baltic after 5 minutes, I’ve near caught pneumonia!”
“Our electric bill is sky high because of that thing”
“Tell *insert family member* to quit using their xbox/laptop/electric heater all day if you’re worried about electric, I need a shower!”
Clearly an immersion approach won’t work. I think I could rig the heater up to a hot plate and use an enamel camping mug pretty easily though. I’ll use a copper wire to form a spiral that dips out at the centre to wrap around the heater. Copper also has the benefit of being very nice to look at.
I don’t think I explained it very well at all so here’s a photo:

The big question is will it work? The heater I want has to be small and take a 12V supply, this limits power to about a 50W, or, 3% of a typical kettle. I could have a heater similar to a kettle but it would require a separate power source as the Uno board (brains of the operation) can only accept a maximum of 12V. So, it’s either cap the heater at 12V too or provide it with power from somewhere else. If an immersion heater approach is inelegant, having two different power supplies wired into the clock is abhorrent.

I’ve done the maths around it a few times and it checks out that a 50W kettle would nearly boil a cup of water in about 20 minutes, which is fine as I’ll be asleep anyway. The problem is, this isn’t a kettle – it’s basically a hob and saucepan, which the internet slates as about 50% less efficient. I’m optimistic though, comparisons on efficiency are difficult to make, especially when I’m building this hob myself and can tweak it to make it more kettle-like. One solution I suppose is to put an insulating sleeve and lid on the cup to ensure it retains all the heat it is given, however, the inclusion of a plastic cup-cover is going to make designing this thing to look as good as it has a right to be (it is a bespoke, hand-built alarm clock after all), considerably more difficult.
For now I know I want a cartridge heater from a 3D printer, some copper tubing (the type used for refrigerant systems) and a 12V power adapter with enough juice to power the 50W heater and an Arduino Uno. I definitely don’t want the heater robbing the board of power.
This is where the mothers lifting cars to save children legend becomes germane, the brain has told the muscles to try and save the child, knowing if things get out of hand it can always take the reigns again and ensure its own preservation returns to being number one priority. It has forgotten, however, that it shares a blood supply with the same muscles it has commanded to perform a very bloodthirsty task. The muscles begin, politely, with their usual allowance of the body’s blood supply but that doesn’t cut it, so they start robbing blood from every other organ in the body, including the brain. The brain is now left with no blood to fuel it. It might very well want to slam the brakes and say hey, we’re in major trouble here, forget about the child, I need that blood to keep us safe. However, without the energy it’s being robbed of it can’t scream its message loud enough to overcome the bedlam besieging the muscles as blood floods into them from all directions. The whole process leaves the muscles torn apart and a brain that has known true anarchy for the first time, now unsure how willing the body will be to return to the dictatorial regime which up to now there had been no alternative to.
In a much less interesting way, if the Arduino turns on the heater which takes 50W from a 50W supply, that leaves nothing for the Arduino, so it can’t send the stop signal until the heater has reached temperatures where it melts its connection to the power supply, at which point there will most certainly be a smouldering puddle of plastic releasing every carcinogen under the rainbow on my bedside cabinet.
All of that isn’t completely true, the heater and Uno have a slightly more democratic way of splitting the power but there’s definitely the risk of a necessary stop command not being sent if the supply is overloaded.
A 60W supply should be fine.

21st Jun 2020 0

Hussle and Motivate

TL;DR: I have an Arduino Uno from an abandoned project that I want to find a use for, a cup of tea being made will all but guarantee I get out of bed in the morning as opposed to checking my phone. A sunrise lamp is a good feature.

A couple of years ago I bought an Osoyoo (knock-off Arduino) Uno CNC plotter kit with the best intentions of building a CNC plotter from scratch, maybe even fitting it with a hot point to make a CNC wood engraver / house fire starter or a “3D printer pen” in a bid to be able to say I made my own 3D printer.

“I, Caleb Halfpenny, have made the thing which can make all things.”

Or words to that effect. In reality, knowing what I now know about the technology, if a competition broke out between myself with my “3D printer” and a toddler, armed with some Play-Doh, I’d just have to hope the child becomes as distracted by the smell of the clay as I always did. I like to picture the intuition that these projects were ill-conceived and destined to disappoint as a tennis player in my brain. A perfect tennis player guarding my physical response receptors, swatting away the neurons obsessed with this silliness before they get the chance to manifest into the actions that would absolutely and undoubtedly lead me to either burn my house down or be embarrassed by a toddler.
In reality though that intuition wasn’t there at all, those tennis ball neurons never even made it over the net as their server limply set them into motion, holding his racket with the grip of a teenage boy holding his younger brother’s hand to cross the road. The feeling of wanting to keep his kin safe and the overbearing teenage fear of being ridiculed causing the emotional scale to net out somewhere around apathy, but it’s an overwhelming apathy, closer to an anxious, confused impasse than real carelessness. The two sides of the internal tug-of-war are pulling with everything they have but neither can gain an inch, all their efforts merely increase the tension in the centre of the rope.
I wanted to pursue that project so that I could advertise it as some engineering feat I had accomplished independently, which would be great for a quirky interview answer – something I valued very highly then while desperately searching for a placement role. I didn’t want to pursue the project because it would take up a lot of placement application time and I didn’t really have a use for a CNC plotter.
So, I resolved not to build the machine, but the tension in that rope didn’t release, it remained as potential energy; untapped potential energy. Since then the unused Uno board has been as present in the back of my mind as it has been in the top of my wardrobe and I’ve always been keen to finally put it to use.

Now, today, I think I’ve found the use for that board. It’s been brewing for a while now; I want an alarm clock to ensure my phone isn’t the first thing I look at every morning and as I considered alarms I grew attracted to the concept of a simulated sunrise and that of tea/coffee preparation. But today the notion hit me that I could make those myself. “Sounds like a nice project” I thought, and went about my business. Somewhere inside though an obsession had began. I realised this myself the next time I went to check in on the idea and some part of my brain had stuck a post-it note to it with a parts list and rough design. Now we’re moving.
The power of having a good morning routine is preached about everywhere and at university it is evident. At university you live on your own terms mostly, if you don’t feel like getting out of bed, there’s no immediate repercussions forcing you against your will. Most days I wake up and go by 9 a.m. at the latest to either attend uni or get to the gym outside of peak hours, this is usually good enough motivation. The weekends though, where I give my body and mind a break are where troublesome habits become clear. I think letting my phone dictate when I get out of bed is a mistake. Using the alarm on it is convenient but it ensures the first thing in my hand every day is also capable of holding my attention for the entire day, and it certainly doesn’t encourage getting out of bed. On a day of low motivation I should be able to rely on my alarm clock to give me a reason to get out of bed. Sometimes the phone does this – a calendar reminder or a text from a friend wanting to go for breakfast, but more normally the phone does the opposite. I can interface with the entire world and live my life through it without getting out of bed and so I probably will, at least until I get hungry or need the bathroom. While I can live life through my phone, I prefer not to, I prefer to get up, enjoy a cup of tea with breakfast and do something a bit more involved like go for a walk at least. The phone has one key advantage in the morning routine though that allows it to win out most of the time – it’s already got my attention. And it sure knows how to keep it. YouTube knows how much I enjoy watching the sun rise so it has to have a bright red icon to catch my attention first. Facebook knows how much I enjoy a good breakfast so it has to bombard me with memes to distract me from my mild hunger. Instagram knows I’d love to get up and be active so it shows me only the prettiest of people, in automatically playing videos and captures my attention before even my own body has a chance to let me know it’s getting restless.
This is for the most part a passive experience though, I don’t actively engage in or even enjoy the morning routine, it’s like talking about the weather – inoffensive and could lead to something better – learning there’s a heatwave on the way, or seeing a post from a friend that shows them having fun. I’ve never went to bed at night excited at the prospect of checking my phone in the morning, or set my alarm for earlier than normal so I can enjoy the first posts of the day in real-time. So I need a wake up call that I can engage with actively, that encourages me to get out of bed, and boiling a cup of water is absolutely perfect for a few reasons:

Starting obvious, a cup of tea has caffeine, which of course takes it’s name from café, which is where a French maid would work. Caffeine being the French maid that walks around behind your eyes dusting off cobwebs when you drink a caffeinated beverage.
I enjoy tea actively rather than passively. One of my favourite things is to bring hot tea to my face and blow on it, basking in the fragrant steam that rises over my face and rejuvenates my eyes. My eyes which I have so cruelly exposed to this harshly arid world again, after a full 8 hours of tranquil bathing under their lids. They get it the worst in the morning, immediately they dry out and so the lids get shut again to spare the pain but they’re already so dry that the lids feel coarse as they close – that didn’t feel right, try again – same result, the pain is too much – I cry slightly, moistening the eyes and hence readying them for another day in this hostile world. This is of course the reason humans cry as a natural reaction to pain, so that the pain of dry eyes in the morning can be alleviated without the brain having to be fully awake.
I also just enjoy drinking tea, you know, like a normal person.
I, for one, can’t drink lying down. At the least I’ll have to sit up in bed to avoid waterboarding myself with scalding tea. My chest now being exposed from the duvet is good priming for taking that next leap out of bed.
This is the most important point of all, all the others rely on me drinking the tea, what’s to stop me just lying on and boiling the kettle later? Well, I am. If there’s one thing I’ll credit myself for it’s not being wasteful. If that water is boiled it’s being used. I’ll do everything in my power to only use one pot when cooking, to the point where it has to be driven by a desire for efficiency rather than just laziness. Old jeans are now garden-work jeans, T-shirts, pyjama tops. I’ll use books I don’t like as work surfaces (my copy of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” was cut to shreds while used as a cutting board. Imagine finding a book about why life is worth living shredded with a scalpel on someone’s bedside cabinet, like some sort of violent protest to the concept that life has meaning. I’d be worried. I didn’t disagree entirely with the book, I just found the way it was written to be absolutely impenetrable – of course life has meaning. Doesn’t it?). So the thought of letting all the energy put into heating that water go to waste is . . . absurd.

A model illustrating point 2 in a much more photogenic way than I could myself. By Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

That’s the motivation then, I want an alarm clock that inspires me to get out of bed, so it should make tea. A gradual illumination of the room is apparently the preferred wake up call for the ancient parts of the human body, which I have to assume are the only ones that matter when I’m sleeping, so that will be a nice feature to add. I have the brains of the operation in an Uno board and the ability to program it myself so I’ll just buy some lights and a heater, the thing will practically build itself. I can swap out the cheap looking white plastic housing these sunrise alarm clocks typically use for whatever I please. It’s going to be a great little project to work on and I’ll use the end product every single day. Fantastic!

20th Jun 2020 0

Introducing the Teamaster 2000: Take the Misery Out of Making Tea

TL;DR: I’m documenting making an “Arduino” Uno alarm clock with LED sunrise and tea making features, hopefully in an entertaining way. Yes, I know no-one will have the patience to get through the writings of a man who makes a TL;DR this long. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism, seeing a block of text like this in the TL;DR section will drive people away so they never read and criticise my work. Maybe I’m just that vain that I think even people who have better things to do and just want to check out a quick summary would be better off spending time here because I’m just such a good writer. Maybe I’m just trying to make something I’ll be proud of and give my as yet latent inner writer an arena to create an Honest Expression.

This blog post, and entire website really, serves to document the tale of calamity and consternation that is the making of my alarm clock. For now this will just be a placeholder so I can find my bearings and make sure I’ve made the right call by using WordPress. In future this will be followed, either appended here (if that’s even possible) or in subsequent blog posts by the aforementioned documenting of one misery-averse man’s quest to introduce tea to his tragically Mrs. Doyle-less morning routine.
The general concept is to have an alarm clock which begins gradually illuminating the room half an hour before get-out-of-bed-and-push-that-boulder-up-the-hill o’clock, mimicking everyone’s favourite star that isn’t called Adele. As if recreating one of the most beautiful natural phenomena conceivable isn’t enough of a task, the alarm clock should also have some water prepared as if it were for chocolate at the Sisyphusean hour every morning. Throw a tea bag in and I can start everyday with a sunrise and a cup of tea.
An “Arduino” Uno is the brains, controlling dimmable LEDs of cooker hood eminence and a cartridge heater as found in 3D printers as well as communicating with a real-time clock and LCD screen.
As for the blog, it seems a little weird to me to be writing this way, flip-flopping between tones of reflection, commentary and planning but a typically concise style of run-down such as a report would ruthlessly highlight the irrelevance of the majority of what I want to write about. I want to write about all the mishaps and “side-quests” along the way and I know for me, as a reader, any other way of writing leads to me getting a little irritated by the more trivial anecdotes in a meandering story. If stories are written entirely in the past tense I find myself thinking “well the ending has already happened and I’d wager that this part had no bearing on it, the writer obviously knows this so why are we here?”. This feeling is exponentially greater when there’s an irrelevant aside in a report or an article. It’s very difficult to make insignificant side-stories so engaging that I forget they’re a part of a larger story with a pre-determined ending, while every “ed” suffixed verb chips away at this illusion. I do know how to enjoy a book, I don’t always treat each scene as means to an end but there are moments even in the best books where I find myself getting tired and searching for the main narrative. These books can be about time travel or life and death and be penned by writers I adore – I’m writing creatively for the first time and it’s about building a clock.
As is obvious from what I’ve said, the old adage “couldn’t see the forest for the trees” rarely applies to me, I’m often focused squarely on the forest. Why focus on one tree when you can look at them all as a forest and form an aggregate view – surely this is better to understand trees (says the engineer). To craft a tree with textures so nuanced and colours so brilliant that it overrides my internal default of wanting to use it to characterise all trees and instead makes me want to understand it alone and how it grew to be so enchanting, that’s a tall order. Thus, shifting through tenses to give the illusion of a currently developing story is best for me – as far as the reader knows there is no forest, only the individual trees they have been introduced to. The fact that the ink of the final words is just as dry regardless of the prose they employ is oddly inconsequential. That’s how I honestly feel and so that’s why this will be written as it is, because it’s for me, really, so I can try my hand at writing something I might enjoy reading.

My use of punctuation makes sense to me but I’ve never fully learned where commas are necessary or the best places for hyphens, semi-colons and full colons, so apologies if it irks you. As an absolute final aside, purely for my own reference – the URL for this blog post’s editing page is my new site’s address followed by /42. A coincidence obviously, but a profound one.

19th Jun 2020 0