A watched kettle took 14 hours to boil when a Hove man asked his gadgets to turn it on

A Hove man spent 14 hours this week trying to get his gadgets to speak to his kettle to tell it to boil, meaning he only got his cup of tea at gone midnight.

Mark Rittman wanted to find out if he could get his collection of gadgets, including his iphone and electronic health band, to work out that he’d got up in the morning, and turn up the heating, put the lights on and boil his wifi-enabled ikettle just in time for when he got out of the shower.

However, although his gadgets are smart, they’re not yet so smart they can talk to each other as they use different operating systems, which meant Mark found himself spending a couple of hours hacking a solution.

It was when he tried to get his kettle to work using his new Amazon Echo, which recognises your voice from across the room, that the hours really started to tick by.

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

And the task was made harder when his tweets detailing the mission started to viral, and the retweets messed with his system:

Now the Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT integration with Amazon Echo pic.twitter.com/ryd42c5ewj

— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016

You can read his explanation of why it took so long on his blog here – but for the less technically minded, the most interesting point will be that it wasn’t until 12.11am yesterday that the kettle boiled and Mark finally got his cup of tea.

My work is done. And now onto everything else I meant to do today, after that first cup of tea. pic.twitter.com/bJPuJ85TCT

— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016