Sous-vide Cooker

The inspiration

A Sous-vide machine can retail for upwards of $700, we built one from off the shelf parts from home depot!

We used a 1500W heating element that was made for water boilers from Home Depot. We chose this because the next one up would be 2000W and that would trip most common electrical circuits as they are rated for 15A.

Our project

We used a dremel tool to drill 5 holes on the lid of a pot. One big hole for the heating element and four holes for the temperature gauge and supporting structures. The temperature probe we used was a DS18B20 and we wrapped it around a solid stick of aluminium so it would be stable and won't touch the heating element.

We soon found out that the Edison was not capable of communicating with the DS18B20 as it does not support the OneWire protocol. We used an Arduino Uno to be a middleman for the DS18B20 and the Intel Edison and sent the temperatures through pins 0 and 1 (TX and RX).

Then on the Intel Edison we displayed the temperatures on a Grove LED LCD as well as the time left. On a breadboard we attached buttons that will interfere with the Edison and would allow the user to adjust the target temperature as the time.

We bought a 40A Solid State Relay to control the heating element from the Edison and hooked up the heating element using 12Ga wire. 

When the temperature reaches the target, the relay turns off which turns off the heating element. When the temperature falls below the target, it will turn it back on.

Future things we can add is a motor that will spin and help agitate the water to help disperse the heated water.