Hasta La Gadget!

Two London designers decided to come up with a get-rich-quick scheme whilst waiting for a bartender to mix their drinks. The result? A kitchen appliance which could communicate through Twitter. And what kitchen appliance would any self-respecting Englishman choose? An electric kettle, or the Twettle.

When we first saw Tweeting appliances, they were a laughable novelty: a Twittering toilet designed to show up the banality of most Tweets, for example. But as the network has grown into a ubiquitous and always-on tool, a tool designed for fast, short and current messages, using it to tell you your toast is cooked now seems a lot less trivial.

Designers Ben Perman and Murat Mutlu decided to put their circuitry inside a kettle, because a) tea is “the cornerstone of British culture” and b) an actual working product is a lot more sexy than a circuit board and a bundle of wires. It is also a device which benefits from remote monitoring.

The Twettle’s production story is long and fascinating, and as far from a cable-sprouting Arduino hack as it could be. Mutlu’s blog post takes us through the process, including the design decisions needed to make a kettle that could connect to the internet but still be simple enough to use and setup. The tech is also designed to fit into any other appliance, like a washing-machine, so that needed to be considered, too.

The Twettle works via WiFi, connecting directly to the internet and tweeting when it has boiled. Now, if you switch it on yourself, you know that the kettle will boil in a minute or two, but in, say, an office, it might be helpful to know that the water is done so you can rush to the kitchenette with a sachet of powdered soup, or even to catch up on gossip as others make their tea.

But putting WiFi into a dumb appliance isn’t easy. You need, for instance, a way to get the network password into the wireless radio (housed in the kettle’s base). The simplest way turned out to be a small screen, something that microwaves and other appliances already have. You also need to enter Twitter account details.

The Twettle also has an API (application programming interface) to allow others to hack it and add functionality. For instance, you could actually switch the kettle on via Twitter Direct Message (useful in student houses where nobody wants to leave the sofa – or the joint – to make the tea). Or the Twettle could be told to “boil” at a lower temperature for making coffee. The API also allows for stats, as seen below. You can count how many cups you have made, for instance, to make sure you reach the weekly quota required to remain in the country.

Putting refrigerators and other kitchen devices on the internet has been a weird obsession of manufacturers for years now, but it is finally starting to make sense. Only instead of automatically ordering milk when you use the last drop, the Tweeting fridge would just remind you to grab a carton on the way home.

So when can you buy yourself, or your favorite Englishman, a Twettle? It might be a while. The biggest challenge for Mutlu and Perman turned out not to be the design but the manufacturing costs. If they aim for a price of £75 ($115), then the required production run will cost around $500,000. The boys are looking for funding. In the meantime, they can enjoy a nice cup of tea.

Twettle. The Kettle that Tweets [Mobile Inc. Thanks, Murat!]

See Also:

• Toaster, Toilet Lead Appliance Invasion of Twitter
• DIY Kit Helps Your Plant Twitter
• Houseplants Will Twitter You When Thirsty

You may remember Scott Amron from his Brush & Rinse toothbrush, which channels a jet of rinsing water into your mouth. Or his Keybrid, a split-ring key with its own keyring built-in. Both of these concept designs made it to market, which sends a chill of fear through me as I consider that one day, I may actually see his new invention in the wild.

The Heatswell is an endothermic (heat-activated) coating for a paper coffee-cup. When that cup is filled with a tasty hot beverage, the band swells into a thick, insulating cloth-like material, offering both grip and heat-protection for your fingers. It’s thin, safe and cheaper than a cup and collar together. So what’s the problem? Take a look at the video. The Heatswell does indeed swell impressively, only it swells like a diseased tree-trunk blistering under napalm.

The end of the video has even more terrifying mutations, but once we get over the accelerated cancerous growths, we can see that this cup could actually end up in a Starbucks near you (and trust me, there is a Starbucks near you). Not only is it cheaper, and made from an FDA-approved material, but it cuts out a step of the coffee-serving process and offers the opportunity for branding – although I’m not sure which company would like to see its logo ballooning like a necrotic canker.

Scott is already sending out samples. I’m hoping to get one and combine it with one of those self-heating hand-warmers for my own invention: The Heat Engine, a perpetual machine which will power the world!

Heatswell [Amron Experimental. Thanks, Scott!]

The only way to be truly prepared for every alcoholic emergency is to always carry a bottle opener with you, but this is, of course, impractical and easy to forget. So what about building an opener into something that you do always carry with you? That’s exactly what the Happy Hour Watch is for.

The quartz timepiece has a bottle opener in the buckle, keeping spraying beer away from the watch itself, which is fashioned from alloy with a stainless-steel back. The watch has two faces, one LCD and the other with traditional hands, and only marked with one hour (beer O’clock).

This only takes care of beer bottles (and if you have two bottles of beer, you have a beer opener anyway), so it’s more suited to tailgating than to romantic picnics. On the other hand, you should be buying screw-top wine anyway: no cork-taint and no corkscrew required. The Happy Hour Watch is $50.

Happy Hour Watch [Happy Hour Timepieces via Uncrate]

Burn, Coca Cola’s take on horrible taurine-laced energy drinks, has introduced a new can which will help those who can’t manage to choke down more than a couple of mouthfuls in a single session.

The new soda-can, available in the Netherlands, features a resealable top. The plastic stopper twists open, releasing any fizzy-pressure and revealing the mouth-hole. When you are done, twist to re-seal and toss in the trash, happy in the knowledge that the remains won’t leak out onto the floor.

Despite the need for yet more packaging materials, I like the idea of a resealable soda-can, especially when cycling. It’s just a shame that it has to be this particular drink, which I have tasted and found to be disgusting (although thankfully lacking the vomit-smell of the market leader). I’ll stick to the energy drink of the ages, the beverage which has fueled rock-n-roll behavior, bar-fights and unwanted tattoos throughout history: cheap Tennessee whiskey.

Burn [Burn Energy via Geekologie]

The +/- Hot Plate wins the award for the day’s most literally named gadget. The plate itself is a normal ceramic circle, but it has circuitry printed on it in the form of “silk-screened gold and amorphic metal films”. These are hooked up to a DC power supply and the printed circuit acts like a heating element, sloughing off its resisted electricity in the form of heat and warming (or even cooking) any foodstuffs on top, working just like a car-window de-icer element.

The plate was designed by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow for a competition named “Dining In 2015″. Even when not plugged in, the filigreed heating strips make a curiously beautiful pattern. The problem is that, with the DC-in circuitry in a plastic box underneath, this isn’t going to be dishwasher safe.

Dining In 2015 [Design Boom via more Design Boom]