Ever make a hot cuppa tea to accompany a night of work, get too engrossed with the task at hand, only to later come back to lukewarm soggy tea?

Tealight is an interactive device prototype made using an Arduino, temperature sensor and adafruit LED strip as feedback. It measures the cup’s external temperature and gives real time visual feedback of how hot the drink is. The speed of the lights also mimics the behaviour of molecules at different levels of heat (i.e. high heat = high molecular speed).

When the tea is at its hottest, the LED lights will shine at maximum brightness and redness, and circulate around the cup at a high speed. As the drink cools down, the lights will slow down and shine less intensely. Past a specified temperature (whatever the user considers too cold for satisfactory consumption), the lights will change from dim red to dim blue, alerting the viewer that more hot water should be added to heat up the tea. The blue light intensifies and moves even slower as the drink gets colder.

Tealight video docmentation: