[Live Document]Tea Den Aging Project Goals:

• Accurate representation of variables influencing tea aging
• Accurate visual representation of tea aging over time
• Subjective perspective of tea aging over time

Creating a “Smart” Pumador

Materials & Tools:

• • HomeAssistant
  • Wifi Smart Socket
  • Zigbee Humidity & Temperature Sensor
  • Seedling Heating Mat
  • Boveda 69% Two-Way Humidity Control Pack, Size 320
  • Insulation
  • NodeMCU ESP32 SBC
  • SHTC3 Temperature and Humidity Sensor

Version 1:

I used a Zigbee-protocol humidity and temperature sensor to start (the square device in there).  While zigbee is great for household lights, zigbee devices work best in a tight mesh with amplifier or repeaters within the system.  As my pumador is far away from other zigbee devices, the quality of the signal was iffy at best, and the sensors in this device aren’t great.

Gotta build my own I guess.

Version 2:

I’m using a ESP32 board (NodeMCU 38 pinout) and a SHTC3 humidity and temperature sensor.  Way way better.

Wrap it up in blankets:

Here is the added logic beyond a standard ESPHome template for an ESP32 device, in case you want to build your own:

• i2c:
  • sda: GPIO21
  • scl: GPIO22
  • scan: true
• sensor:
  • – platform: shtcx
  • temperature:
    • name: “Pumador Temperature”
  • humidity:
    • name: “Pumador Humidity”
  • update_interval: 30s

While it does require a wired power source (I mean I could run this off a portable battery but w/e), this device is way way way more accurate.

I also moved my pumador into the room adjacent to our furnace to reduce the burden on the heating pad and save a bit of money.  The concern in this room is the ambient humidity is extremely low, but so far so good!

Here’s how it looks inside my HomeAssistant UI:

Wattage reading, effectively its power cycle visualized:

DATA DATA DATA

Humidity and temperature updates every hour directly from my pumedor to the interactive graph below.

Publish It Online, Of Course

Naturally I had to figure out a way to get it online.  I’m using HomeAssistant’s API, pulling data to a spreadsheet file via an hourly cron job, which I then run some simple python on to generate the above graph.  It also takes a screenshot and updates the featured image of this blog post hourly.

The chart is embedded with an iframe on this page — I dare you to inspect this page’s code — so if you wanna use it yourself, here’s the URL: https://teadb.org/humidity_temperature_graph.html

Also, weird.  We talked about this.

Also also, the above URL gives you a fullscreen view of the data for even more pixels, if that’s your thing.  You’re still weird.

Taking Photos: Color Accuracy Over Time

Turns out, to do this right is hard.

My 80/20 TLDR:

• Taking photos at night
• Same lighting setup
• Take a lot of photos
• Color match photos across time

Materials & Tools

• RawTherapee
• Color Correction Card

Lighting Setup

White2Tea Hypnotrain

TeaDB Episode #520: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBFJ9Hy2Nho

URL: https://white2tea.com/products/2022-hypnotrain

Photos taken on 1/28/25: