I have finished my most recent assignment, 2 years + working for Holcim Indonesia on CSR things. It was a good time, good work and fantastic colleagues. I've got lots of inquiries out but nothing solid yet.
So with all my free time I thought I'd start a project. Since my annual barbecue is coming up I was thinking about food, and I've been interested for a while in Sous Vide, French for "cooking meat for a long time in a plastic bag buried in water with the temperature carefully controlled." Google it.
I found a few people who have done something similar. I was going to use a TI Launchpad 430G2, for the simple reason that it looked up to the job and I have a few lying around (cost $4.30). I ordered some SSRs and probes from eBay and am still waiting for their arrival. My first idea was to copy the absolutely awesome Sous Vader, but rewrite the C code to speak to the TI chip.
Meanwhile, I've been out and bought an extra large Sanyo rice cooker, 395W, which should do the job. It has three heating elements, so I'm hopeful I won't need to worry about circulation.
However, a week and a half of searching has led me to conclude that I don't have the smarts to do this on the TI without expert help. Most of the controllers out there are built with Arduino and ATM, and it would take me a long time to decipher the external calls in an ATM C program and find/make the TI equivalent. I thought perhaps I could tinker and learn a little C, but the job is simply too big.
But, I do have a couple of Raspberry Pi units here, one is busy running my media centre but two others just resting. There are a couple of great Pi temperature control examples out there: Steve Smith's RasPiBrew and Chris Swan's sous vide unit. Neither of these is exactly what I want, however. The first has an LCD and uses an I2C adapter which I don't have (but that seems like a practical idea for protection. I'm seriously thinking about going back to this design, but not right now. The second wasn't how I want to wire the mains (I'm using a Fotek 25A SSR now on order). Both use PID (or PI) loops for tuning the heater response to temperature changes, something I really want to include and something that was not included in some simpler projects. Back to the drawing board.
So with all my free time I thought I'd start a project. Since my annual barbecue is coming up I was thinking about food, and I've been interested for a while in Sous Vide, French for "cooking meat for a long time in a plastic bag buried in water with the temperature carefully controlled." Google it.
I found a few people who have done something similar. I was going to use a TI Launchpad 430G2, for the simple reason that it looked up to the job and I have a few lying around (cost $4.30). I ordered some SSRs and probes from eBay and am still waiting for their arrival. My first idea was to copy the absolutely awesome Sous Vader, but rewrite the C code to speak to the TI chip.
Meanwhile, I've been out and bought an extra large Sanyo rice cooker, 395W, which should do the job. It has three heating elements, so I'm hopeful I won't need to worry about circulation.
However, a week and a half of searching has led me to conclude that I don't have the smarts to do this on the TI without expert help. Most of the controllers out there are built with Arduino and ATM, and it would take me a long time to decipher the external calls in an ATM C program and find/make the TI equivalent. I thought perhaps I could tinker and learn a little C, but the job is simply too big.
But, I do have a couple of Raspberry Pi units here, one is busy running my media centre but two others just resting. There are a couple of great Pi temperature control examples out there: Steve Smith's RasPiBrew and Chris Swan's sous vide unit. Neither of these is exactly what I want, however. The first has an LCD and uses an I2C adapter which I don't have (but that seems like a practical idea for protection. I'm seriously thinking about going back to this design, but not right now. The second wasn't how I want to wire the mains (I'm using a Fotek 25A SSR now on order). Both use PID (or PI) loops for tuning the heater response to temperature changes, something I really want to include and something that was not included in some simpler projects. Back to the drawing board.
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