All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water.
Rittman, a data specialist who lives in Hove, England, set about trying to make a cup of tea around 9am.
But thanks to his Wi-Fi enabled kettle it wasn’t long before he ran into trouble.
.@Nephentur Just in case anyone is thinks I'm nuts, purpose of all this is to create a real-world IoT event src for home IoT Hadoop project pic.twitter.com/WEwH5biBGd
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
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. pic.twitter.com/lC3uNX5WTp
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Now my wifi kettle is basically taking the p*ss. Told me it had found network, now you need to recalibrate me, oh btw I didn't rly connect pic.twitter.com/WbGsIrzBio
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Three hours later the kettle was still having problems. The main issue seemed to be that the base station was not able to communicate with the kettle itself.
News of Rittman’s plight quickly spread on Twitter, further slowing his progress.
Still the kettle refused to play ball.
A key problem seemed to be that Rittman's kettle didn't come with software that would easily allow integration 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.
Then, after 11 hours, a breakthrough: the kettle started responding to voice control.
And finally - success!
Although some people following Rittman’s progress - justifiably - wondered what was wrong with the old technology.
Guardian