Sous-vide cooking controller

I've been experimenting with sous-vide cooking recently. The main appeal for me is to be able to buy meats when they are on sale and put them in the freezer. Then later thaw and cook them in the sous-vide machine with very little effort. To keep things simple, I wanted to use a rice cooker as the heater and water container. With this setup I only needed to build a simple temperature controlling device to get started.

The board, which I repurposed as the temperature controller. It was originally built for driving an electrodynamic shaker.

Bottom side of the controller board.

For the temperature controller, I happened to have an old board laying around, which I originally built to drive an electrodynamic shaker. The board has an ATmega48 microcontroller, with a number of GPIO pins brought out to headers as well as an open drain output capable of driving inductive loads, such as a relay coil, so it was well suited for the task.

Relay box for controlling the rice cooker.

The relay box with its cover removed. Everything is submerged in hot glue. The relay disconnects both terminals. The clearance between the low-voltage and high voltage is about an inch. I'm very confident that this is completely safe.

The temperature sensor I chose to use was a waterproofed DS18B20 sensor from eBay, which I also had laying around. While for the power switching I built a relay box out of an old in-socket power switch. The relay coil connections are brought out to the controller board, while all the mains voltage connections are contained within the relay box case.

I implemented a simple bang-bang temperature controller which turned the heating on whenever the temperature was below 60 Celsius and turned off the heating whenever the temperature was above 60.5 Celsius. In the first test I had a small computer fan submerged to act as a circulation pump. I was expecting it to work underwater for a long time, but it turns out that 5V is still high enough to cause the wires to corrode and break in a matter of hours through an electrochemical reaction. However, I noticed that there was no real need for water circulation, as in the end the surface water temperature matched the bottom temperature within 1 Celsius. Circulation might speed up the cooking time a bit, but I'll investigate that at some later point in time.

The first roast beef I made with this setup turned out very good. I used the original vacuum plastic bag which the meat came in and this worked well. Setting everything up, however, was a convoluted operation. Changing the cooking temperature for instance required reprogramming the microcontroller.

Wiring in the connections for the LCD and encoder. More wiring is on the other side of the protoboard.

Controller board in place. Showing also the back side piece of the case.

Testing the LCD interface. The display shows 1 temperature sensor found on the 1-wire bus, which is reading 492 counts = 30.75 Celsius.

To make the device useful, I added an HD44780 LCD, for which there was just barely enough GPIO. I had to move the temperature sensor to share a pin with the ISP interface to make room for the LCD. For the user input I had planned on using an encoder with an integrated push button. This would however require 3 additional GPIO lines, which I did not have available. As a compromise, I had to share GPIO between the LCD and encoder. The sharing is done simply by having the switches in the encoder pull down the LCD data lines through 1k resistors. These resistors are small enough to pull low against the internal pull-up resistors on the GPIO when the port acts as an input, but large enough to not interfere with port operations when the port is acting as an output. As writing to the LCD only takes a very short time, this port sharing doesn't cause any real concurrency issues (that is, just an occasional encoder pulse goes undetected every now and then).

The controller keeping water in the rice cooker at 60 Celsius. "T:60.0" indicates the set temperature. "=60.3" indicates the measured temperature. "o" indicates that the relay is off (it shows "i" when relay is on). Manual override is not enabled, as there is no "m" next to the "o". "85%" indicates the currently observed duty cycle. The 8 last characters form a graph of the duty cycle over the last 8 hours.

The user interface I came up with is very simple. The display shows the set temperature, the current temperature (or a possible error condition), duty cycle of the control as well as the relay state. The observed duty cycle is also displayed on an ~8 hour graph. Turning the encoder changes the set temperature in an intuitive way. Pushing the encoder button for the first time activates manual override mode with relay set to off. Pushing it a second time continues in manual override mode with the relay set to on. A third push exits manual override mode and the relay is again under temperature control. There is also an indication on the LCD when manual override mode is chosen.

Now I'll just have to wait for bargains on meats to fill the freezer. Yum.

One last picture.