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Cooking pasta is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen, second only to watching a pot of water boil. But as pasta maker Barilla points out on their website, you can reduce your meal’s CO₂ emissions by up to 80% if you simply let the pasta sit in the hot water rather than actively boil it the whole time — a technique known as passive cooking.

The trick is getting the timing right, so in a fairly surprising move, Barilla has released the design for an open source device that will help you master this energy-saving technique. Granted it’s not a terribly complex piece of hardware, consisting of little more than an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, an NTC probe, and a handful of passive components wrapped up in a 3D-printed case. But the documentation is great, and we’ve got to give Barilla credit for going way outside of their comfort zone with this one.

Magnets in the 3D printed case let it stick to the lid of your pot, and when it detects the water is boiling, the gadget alerts your phone (at least for this version of the device, an Android or iOS application is required) that it’s time to put in the pasta. A few minutes later it will tell you when you can turn off the burner, after which it’s just a matter of waiting for the notification that your passively-cooked pasta is ready to get pulled out.

Like the prop making video Sony put out after the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, we recognize that on some level this is an advertisement for Barilla pasta. But if developing useful open source gadgets that can be built by the public is what a company wants to spend their advertising dollars on, you won’t catch us complaining. Hell, we might even spring for a box of Barilla next time we’re in the store.

Thanks to [fgma] for the tip.

If your idea of a six-course meal is a small order of chicken nuggets, you might have missed the rise of sous vide among cooks. The idea is you seal food in a plastic pouch and then cook it in a water bath that is held at a precise temperature. That temperature is much lower than you usually use, so the cook times are long, but the result is food that is evenly cooked and does not lose much moisture during the cooking process. Of course, controlling a temperature is a perfect job for a microcontroller and [Kasperkors] has made his own setup using an Arduino for control. The post is in Danish, but Google translate is frighteningly good.

The attractive setup uses an Arduino Mega, a display, a waterproof temperature probe, and some odds and ends. The translation does fall down a little on the parts list, but if you substitute “ground” for “earth” and “soil” you should be safe. For the true epicurean, form is as important as function, and [Kasperkors’] acrylic box with LEDs within is certainly eye-catching. You can see a video of the device, below.

The switches, LEDs, and relays are all pretty standard fare. The real heart of the project is the temperature control. Many controllers use a PID (proportional/integral/derivative) to hold the temperature, but this project takes a more pragmatic approach. Depending on how far from the set point the temperature is, the controller simply drives the heating element differently and measures more or less frequently to adjust. For example, if the temperature is more than two degrees low, the heating element is left on constantly. As it gets closer, though, the heating element runs for 10 seconds, there’s a 5 second wait, and then the algorithm reads the temperature again.

There’s a lot of debate about how precise the temperature has to be. Apparently, for things like fish, a wide range of temperatures isn’t a problem. Eggs, however, need tighter control because their proteins can denature (whatever that means).

There’s also a safety relay that shuts the whole affair down if the temperature goes very high or low so a bad temperature sensor won’t boil everything away. We might have considered doing that with a bimetallic coil so that even an Arduino failure would not stop it from working.

We’ve seen other attractive sous vide setups. Not to mention the more utilitarian builds made with a crock pot. No matter what it looks like, these projects are probably not going to help your waistline.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks

If your idea of a six-course meal is a small order of chicken nuggets, you might have missed the rise of sous vide among cooks. The idea is you seal food in a plastic pouch and then cook it in a water bath that is held at a precise temperature. That temperature is much lower than you usually use, so the cook times are long, but the result is food that is evenly cooked and does not lose much moisture during the cooking process. Of course, controlling a temperature is a perfect job for a microcontroller and [Kasperkors] has made his own setup using an Arduino for control. The post is in Danish, but Google translate is frighteningly good.

The attractive setup uses an Arduino Mega, a display, a waterproof temperature probe, and some odds and ends. The translation does fall down a little on the parts list, but if you substitute “ground” for “earth” and “soil” you should be safe. For the true epicurean, form is as important as function, and [Kasperkors’] acrylic box with LEDs within is certainly eye-catching. You can see a video of the device, below.

The switches, LEDs, and relays are all pretty standard fare. The real heart of the project is the temperature control. Many controllers use a PID (proportional/integral/derivative) to hold the temperature, but this project takes a more pragmatic approach. Depending on how far from the set point the temperature is, the controller simply drives the heating element differently and measures more or less frequently to adjust. For example, if the temperature is more than two degrees low, the heating element is left on constantly. As it gets closer, though, the heating element runs for 10 seconds, there’s a 5 second wait, and then the algorithm reads the temperature again.

There’s a lot of debate about how precise the temperature has to be. Apparently, for things like fish, a wide range of temperatures isn’t a problem. Eggs, however, need tighter control because their proteins can denature (whatever that means).

There’s also a safety relay that shuts the whole affair down if the temperature goes very high or low so a bad temperature sensor won’t boil everything away. We might have considered doing that with a bimetallic coil so that even an Arduino failure would not stop it from working.

We’ve seen other attractive sous vide setups. Not to mention the more utilitarian builds made with a crock pot. No matter what it looks like, these projects are probably not going to help your waistline.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks
Mag
07

If you like to cook or bake, you probably don’t measure everything out in little bowls and ramekins before you start. Well,unless you also happen to like doing dishes. Even so, there are a lot of measuring spoons and -cups that end up getting dirty in the process. But what if you had a measuring machine to dole out spices and low-viscosity liquids in specific quantities for you?

[enddev]’s creation is based around an Arduino Mega, and the interface is three buttons and an LCD. The user selects between liquid and powder, followed by the desired measurement. If liquid is chosen, the peristaltic pump is engaged to deliver the specified amount through silicone tubing. The current powder setup uses a kitchen scale, which the designers found to be inaccurate for small amounts. They believe that a volume auger and stepper motor would be ideal.

The team mentions that the powder delivery system is better suited for flakier substances since it’s basically agitated out of the container. This makes us think this would be great for feeding fish. If you take this admirably-written Instructable and use it to feed your fish or something, let us know. Their code is on the gits.

[via Embedded Lab]


Filed under: Arduino Hacks, cooking hacks


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