[plug] Call me crazy...

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 10:13:47AM +0800, Adam Hewitt wrote:
| But does anyone with any significant electronics knowledge know if it would
| be possible to somehow connect a kettle to a serial port on a PC so that you
| could boil the kettle from your desktop and get some type of reading to tell
| you when its boiled??

(There's an old saying about how the only thing more dangerous than an
electronics guy with a compiler is a software guy with a soldering iron.
Well I fall into the latter category so take everything I say with a
large measure of salt...)

Assuming an electric kettle with a thermostat: it should be possible to
make use of the thermostat to toggle a particular line on the serial
port.  You could probably also use the power switch for the purpose.  If
the switch only has one pole you'd have to alter the kettle to use a
relay which switches the heating element on as well as fiddling a line
on the serial port.  I'm not sure which lines on the serial port would
be most appropriate but some Googling for the serial connector pin-out
and also looking for what lines you can read the status of using
ioctl().

Other options include a webcam and in the case of older kettles which
'whistle' when they're boiling, perhaps some kind of audio input.

Cameron.

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