Let’s get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we.
Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168, “Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances” which extends HTCPCP to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, “I’m a teapot”; this comes from the 1998 standard.
I’m giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let’s try this out!
As it turns out, I could find no physical implementations of HTCPCP or the tea-brewing extension. The original protocol is somewhat incomplete, which is probably the main issue; also, any modern appliance would probably talk its own protocol encoded in JSON or similar.
While researching for the talk, I did find Hacked-Together Coffeepot Control Protocol which was a UMaryland hackathon project in 2016. They won the prize for “most technologies used in their tech stack”, which is …something.
Oh, how I miss the days when hackathons would result in such things! In my country they are VC-pitch-a-thons. No actual things are built.
“most technologies used in their tech stack” sounds like a lot of fun to implement!
It’s true though, if I designed an IoT coffeepot it would probably use something like JSON over MQTT or UDP. Although I would likely also connect it to a hardware RNG so its caffeination can exist as a quantum superposition of states until I drink the coffee. I hear that makes it taste better.