Simple DIY Upgrade Boosts Pizza Oven Performance
If your pizza oven produces unevenly cooked pizzas, you’ll want to check out Yvo de Haas' Spin Meister.
You love pizza — we all do. And so you got excited when you were perusing your local big box store and saw that outdoor pizza oven for sale. Evenly cooked pizza in the backyard with the family? What’s not to love? But you may have been a tiny bit disappointed with the results, as those small, portable pizza ovens tend to heat unevenly and require frequent turning. After all, they’re open on one side with a big gas flame on the other side. That can leave pizza blackened in some areas, but almost undercooked in others. To solve this problem, Yvo de Haas built the Spin Meister.
Spin Meister is a system for rotating a pizza on the stone within the oven, sort of like a rotisserie chicken twirling above a grill. Just like in the case of that chicken, the idea is to cook the pizza evenly. Instead of leaving the pizza sitting stationary and exposed to hot spots or cold spots for the entire process, Spin Meister keeps it moving. That produces consistent heat across the entire surface of the pizza.
This works with Ooni’s Koda 12 pizza oven and requires the parts from a ZIFA Grills Pizzatwister. That is a rotating (unpowered) platform for round pizza stones, which is supposed to make it easier for chefs to manually turn their pizzas. Spin Meister motorizes that platform so the pizza stone rotates automatically at all times at a steady speed.
Spin Meister turns the Pizzatwister platform using a stepper motor controlled by an Arduino Nano through a TMC2100 silent stepper driver. The driver connects to the motor through a long cable so the electronics and the 3D-printed enclosure can sit safely away from the heat of the oven. The other electronic components in the enclosure include the display and the controls. The screen is a 12-digit VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) and the controls consist of two buttons and two potentiometer sliders. Those let the user adjust the pizza stone’s rotation speed and the amount of time for it to run.
Finally, de Haas added sound effects with a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player. That gives Spin Meister the ability to sound an alarm after a set amount of time, signaling that the pizza is done.
de Haas designed Spin Meister specifically for the Ooni Koda 12 pizza oven, but it should also work with other models that accept a rotation platform like the Pizzatwister.