My Sous Vide Machine

I've wanted to build a Sous Vide machine for some time, and after participating in a Kickstarter project for a vacuum sealer that uses Ziplock bags (ThriftyVac), it was time to do it.

The Arduino with LCD shield and 

Sous Vide is a method of slow cooking food in a temperature controlled hot water bath.  You can buy expensive units to do this, but the amazing internet DIY community has come up with some alternative methods.  (Which, in the end...may cost close to as much as the pre-built units...but aren't nearly as much fun.)

Here's the thought process.  You want to cook something in water for a long period of time.  You want to control the temperature of that water.  Well, if you hook a thermometer and a relay switch up to an arduino, and plug a crock pot into the relay, you can accomplish both of those things.

In short, the arduino will tell the relay switch when the crock pot should receive power and when it shouldn't.  It does this based off of the thermometer that is resting comfortably inside of the crock pot.  When you go over the desired temperature, the crock pot will turn off.  When you are under the temperature, it turns on.  Simple, right?

In my research, I found a number of different methods for pulling off this project.  Most were from my favorite DIY site (Instructables).

• Arduino Sous-Vide Cooker  This project really cut to the basics.  It's got the arduino, thermometer, relay, and crock pot.
• Sous Vide Cooker for Less than $40 This was another option.  It used a digital temperature controller purchased from Ebay (or Amazon) in lieu of the Arduino.  An arguably "cleaner" approach but not quite as much fun as most of the DIY comes in putting together the box that houses the unit.  
• Adafruit Sous Vide This is the option I went with.  Adafruit, an excellent website for purchasing electronics and other kits from, had a tutorial for programming and building the various shields necessary for the project.  They also had some pretty cool code written up to control the beast.

The total setup

It took me a couple of days to put the stuff together, but once it was done, I was ready to test it out.  I plugged the contraption in when I woke up, and by the time I was ready to go to work, I discovered that it worked, but also that it tended to overshoot the desired temperature.

This, of course, was expected.  If you think about it, the crock pot is designed to heat foods up to maybe 200 to 300 degrees F.  And, they are designed to retain heat.  So as it's warming up, it's hotter than the water which it is warming and even if you turn it off, like a train, it's going to keep barreling forward for some time.  And, the ceramic bowl is going to retain that heat for some time even after it's turned off.

The magic of the Adafruit programming is that they try to control for this with some interesting PID programming that you can adjust based on what you are using (i.e. Crock Pot, Rice Cooker, Heating Plate, etc).  I would say that, after using the unit twice, it's still not perfect, but it's a lot better than the first time.

The first food that I cooked in the Sous Vide was a fillet of Tilapia that came pre vacuum packed.  I dropped this into 60 degrees C water and cooked it for an hour.  And, it was really good.  The fish was perfectly cooked and amazingly flaky.

I found some helpful information on Sous Vide Cooking at these websites:

http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/en-us/sousvide_cookingtemperatures.htm

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/03/how-to-sous-vide-steak.html

My second attempt at Sous Vide used a vacuum sealed steak.  This was cooked at 54.5 degrees C for about an hour.  And, it was good, but I don't know if I thought it was amazing.

Anyhow, the project was a success.  I may consider purchasing a rice cooker in the future.  I believe that it will heat up faster than the crock pot, and perhaps not overshoot as much.  Right now, it takes about 2 hours to stabilize the water temperature.  That isn't bad, but it does require some planning if I want to use it.

And, I also want to write some basic code for the Arduino so that, even if it's not as fancy as the adafruit code, I can at least learn how to take temperature readings and control a LCD shield.

Building my Mechanized Android

Let's kick things off.  For starters, I didn't design this project.  We can extend a heartfelt thanks to Instructables.Com contributor "tanabata" for his excellent design and instructions.  If you are interested, you can find the project here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Mechanized-Android-Figure/

I saw this project and knew that it was something that I wanted to attempt.  It was just so darn cool.  I already had an android figure, which was already pretty awesome, but who could turn down one that blinked and made beeping sounds!  I couldn't.  So I went ahead and purchased the parts to make it.

This particular project used an ATtiny44A chip, something that I hadn't used before, but I was pretty quickly able to utilize my existing programming board to program the chip.  (This may be one of my favorite parts of doing these projects.  That I can simply hook a chip up to a computer and flash some information to it just makes me super excited.)

This is a pretty decent shot of the schematics that I followed to build the android.  At this point, I didn't have the servo installed, but I had most of the blinking lights up and running.

The next step would be to move from the breadboard to an actual circuit board.  This part would be ridiculously difficult for me.  I am decent at reading schematics, but only decent.  There was a particularly trick section of the project that led me to solder the project up and then break it down many times.  Finally, I decided to solder the thing piece by piece.  It took longer, but in the end, it was worth it.

Then, in the middle of this project, my headphones broke and I needed to fix them.

Back to the android.  Here you can see, the circuit with the speaker.  My original intention was for that smaller circuit board to fit inside the android, as the more experienced author of this project had done.  I used my dremel to cut the board down to size.  And, a hint.  Don't cut circuit boards inside and without proper ventilation.  That stuff is dangerous to inhale and will give you a headache.

This is a video of the working "guts" of the project.

Once I finished the circuit board, it was time to start messing with the plastic android figure.  One of many steps involved cutting holes in the head to allow me to install LED eyes for the figure.  What I was left with, for a short period of time, was a very creepy eyeless head.

I think that one of the hardest parts was simply installing the servo in place in the body.  I had to get some glue down in there and make sure that it was perfectly aligned.  I took a very long time to complete this part.  Mostly because I had no idea how I was going to fit all of those parts inside of the body.  I just didn't have the skills to do it.  I ultimately decided that I would put some parts inside, and then a sort of external house for the rest of the parts.

And, the final project, sans house.

Here is a video of the working Android.

And, here is the android at work, greeting my nohohum doll.

This was a really cool project, and I'm glad that I worked on it.  Here you can clearly see the box that I used for the android guts.

My next project is a secret, but after that, it's going to be a plasma speaker.