Man spends 11 hours trying to make a cup of tea with WiFi kettle
He started at 9am and finished just after midnight
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Your support makes all the difference.A man has spent an entire day trying to make a cup of tea - because he had trouble getting his WiFi kettle to work.
Mark Rittman, a data specialist from Hove, began preparing his brew on Tuesday morning.
At around 9am, he tweeted: “Still haven't had a first cup of tea this morning, debugging the kettle and now iWifi base-station has reset. Boiling water in saucepan now.”
Around an hour later, the data specialist informed his Twitter followers that there was “still no tea”.
Along with a screenshot of his computer screen, Mr Rittman wrote: “Three hours later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base-station reset, now port-scanning network to find where kettle is now.”
Just after 11am, Mr Rittman expressed growing frustration at the hi-tech product, saying: “Now my wifi kettle is basically taking the p*ss. Told me it had found network, now you need to recalibrate me.”
The main problem seemed to be that Rittman’s kettle was having difficulty integrating with other devices in his home, including Amazon Echo, which, like Apple’s Siri, allows users to tell connected smart devices what to do - so Rittman was trying to build the integration functionality himself.
In response to people asking whether it was a “real product”, Mr Rittman explained that it was, but that he was having to "hack together" the connectivity function himself. “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,” he wrote.
After 11 hours, Mr Rittman was able to update that the kettle has started responding to voice control, but there appeared to be a separate problem with the lights in his home. At around 7pm he wrote: “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.”
Finally, Mr Rittman managed to turn on the kettle using WiFi. He posted a video in which he asks the smart device to "boil the kettle", and in turn the kettle begins to boil. He wrote: "My work is done" and said that now, 12 hours later, he could finally "get onto everything else [he] meant to do today, after that first cup of tea."
His experience struck a chord with many social media users.
Though one did wonder why Mr Rittman didn't "just get a normal kettle".
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