An Implementation of Automatic and Network-Controlled Tea Bag Brewing Machine

In this paper, we propose an automatic tea bag brewing machine that can be remotely controlled via Internet. Functions of control were implemented by an hardware-software co-design fashion and programmed into a FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) embedded system development board. Additionally, the development board was connected with several components including a 6-degree and three-dimensional rotating mechanical arm, a thermos bottle, and a water injection control circuit. As such, the proposed IoT-type tea bag brewing machine can be realized. In operation, according to different requirements, user can choose an alternative tea bag and assign different water volumes. By using a networked device such as smart-phone to send control messages to the implemented machine remotely, the mechanical arm of the machine can automatically execute the process of brewing up a cup of tea to minimize the labors' interventions periodically.