2014-06-16 (M) Sous Vide Oven



Yesterday's journal was a total cop-out. There, I admit it. Yes, I do plan to write a fantasy story and the character I wrote will be there but in truth I spent a lot of my Sunday relaxing. I'm not apologizing for relaxing.

Part of me is itching for a new project now that I've finished the tennis ball launcher. I've been hesitant to accept a new project since I've got three significant unresolved projects; the ESPeri.Impass, the Upcycled 3D Printer, and the ASETNIP Keyboard. No matter how hard I try I can't shake the desire to tackle a new challenge.

Back in 2014-05-11 I did some brainstorming for a sous vide oven. These seem like a really bizarre way to cook and I want to try it but the ovens are $400. I can probably build my own for less than $20. Seriously, with a waterproof thermometer, Arduino, and a Crock Pot I think I can safely pull this together. You better believe I'm going to get a crock pot from the thrift store too. How could I not?

Other people have made sous vide ovens and put instructions online but I’m going to try to do a little better and make mine just as effective without having to modify a cooking device. I’ve decided to go the simple route and use a relay to control power to the heater rather than fancy work with a light dimmer.

The advantage of not modifying a perfectly good Crock Pot is that if I screw up, I don’t have to buy a new crock pot. The other advantage is that I’m not limited to using just the one Crock Pot, I can plug in a cheap rice cooker and do the same thing with no programming changes. Or I can plug in a BIG Crock Pot and cook a lot of food or use a small cooker to save energy. Heck, I could even hook it up to an electric hot plate.

Enough background.
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Code for the thermometer was downloaded from bildr.org and saved to my default Arduino project folder. The OneWire library was also necessary but came installed with a previously downloaded version of the Arduino IDE. The bildr code returned a float value. Code was added to turn a relay one or off every minute (60000mS) depending on the target temperature. Code was written to change the target temperature through button presses. Minimal code was written to display information on a 16x2 LCD screen.
Arduino code
 
An extensive list of parts and tools was written but not assembled. The enclosure is a metal encased six receptacle power strip. The metal case will be most suitable for modifications and should be better than inexpensive plastic which would likely be brittle.

This a great chart from the Sous Vide Supreme site
 
To do:
Assemble tools + parts
Construct device
Test
Revise


The rest of the posts for this project have been arranged by date.

A list showing of all the final posts of COMPLETED projects.


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