A man’s battle with his smart kettle has gone viral, after he spent 11 hours trying to make a cup of tea.
Mark Rittman outlined his issues with the Smarter iKettle on Twitter, explaining how Wi-Fi connection issues had led to a long and arduous journey towards successfully pouring his first cup of the tea. Mark’s problems began after the smart kettle’s base was forced to reset, with him also “debugging the kettle” which is a sentence that is surely a sign that the AI apocalypse isn’t far off from becoming a reality:
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
After 3 hours of trying to solve his kettle-related issue, Mark added that he still hadn’t managed to pour a cup of tea using the Smarter iKettle and had now been tasked with recalibrating the device before port-scanning the network:
3 hrs later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base-station reset, now port-scanning network to find where kettle is now. pic.twitter.com/TRQLuLzLpx
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Mark’s problems didn’t end there, though. After his tweet describing his kettle troubles had gone viral, the over-saturation of the network was now causing issues with his Amazon Echo, adding further insult to injury:
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
The kettle then continued to add insult to injury, informing Mark that it still hadn’t bothered to connect to his network.
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
Despite these lingering issues with the kettle, Mark still insisted that the product was “OK apart from flaky Wi-Fi connectivity.” And, y’know, that whole “not working” thing…
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 https://t.co/0IjD7q4wzM
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Mark eventually got the kettle back up and running, though his smart home was still not letting him enjoy his evening in peace. After 11 hours the Smarter iKettle had managed to get back online, though now his smart lights were forced to download an update:
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 pic.twitter.com/yPTDoUkM9Z
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Mark later stated that he was using so many smart home products as part of an Internet of Things project, but he probably didn’t expect to inadvertently highlight pretty much every issue you can expect to face in an IoT-connected home within a 24-hour time period.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a cup of tea in a real kettle.
