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Receive push notifications from your rice cooker
- eternityforest 3y agoI remember when Fuzzy Logic was an everyday tech term that seemed to be the big new hotness. I think people were excited about how they used it in the mass combat simulator software for LoTR. Now it seems to be mostly associated with rice cookers. They must do an amazing job, since it still seems to be people's favorite rice cooking tech!
- morder 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI Great Technology Connections video about how it works.
- gifvenut 3y agoYour video explains how traditional rice cookers work. However it doesn’t explain how fuzzy logic in a rice cooker works.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI thought that was all marketing nonsense and they actually work by detecting when the temperature spikes because the water has been consumed. If I head to head my zojirushi vs a bargain rice cooker with temperature detector, would I be able to tell the difference?
- MisterTea 3y agoThe cheap cookers use a mechanical setup as there are no electronics. I have the cheapest Zojirushi 3-cup cooker where you just push down a lever. That lever mechanically latches a spring loaded mechanism that closes the heating element switch. The temperature will stay relatively stable as the water absorbs the heat keeping it at around 100 C. Once the water is evaporated from the bottom the temperature rises which trips a bimetallic mechanism releasing the spring loaded lever opening the heater switch. Stupid simple.
- kjellsbells 3y agoTangential, but one reason zojirushi is a buy it for life product is because you can get spare parts for a very long time. I have a 20 year old zj with no fundamental failures beyond the cookpot getting old and dented, and zj part replacements are easy and cheap.
- yborg 3y agoTry replacing the clock battery on a unit that has one :/
- gomox 3y agoDisappointing aspect indeed, but the battery is only relevant to people that use the clock to set cooking times a lot AND ALSO keep their rice cooker unplugged. The intersection of those 2 groups is likely minimal, and the slight inconvenience of setting the time for the aforementioned group is not that bad.
- nosrepa 3y agoOr is it [reaching the curie point of a magnet to switch the heat off](https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI)?
- MisterTea 3y agoGood point. I haven't looked at mine but perhaps it is.
- invalidator 3y agoMine consistently produces better rice than my old mechanical one. It's also slower. I think it does a more gentle temperature ramp than the mechanical one did.
- gomox 3y agoI replaced a crummy spring/latch one with a Zoji induction 3 cup and I would never go back to the old one. Rice is always evenly cooked and never stuck/toasted at the bottom, keep warm with tracking of elapsed time, countdown to being done, plus flexibility for lots of different type of rice and grains. Could you do the job with a cheap one? Sure, but you can always make rice on the stovetop as well if savings/space are a big priority. This is a convenience appliance, and the convenience of the fancy ones is a significant improvement over the basic ones.
- orbisvicis 3y agoWhen I cook rice I purposefully take the lid off and add 10 extra minutes to get that delicious crispy bottom.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoTahdig! You can better control it if you wrap the lid in a towel and boil the rice on a low fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_rice#Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_rice#Iran
- halfnormalform 3y agoThe Zojirushi 3 cup induction is the highest scoring rice cooker tested by Consumers Union. It was expensive but it makes excellent rice and you don’t have to be precise with the water. I hope to have it for the rest of my life.
- gravescale 3y agoI've always assumed it was a name for a clever way to improve on limitations of simple bang-bang control with on-off sensors and actuators plus some 7400 series-type logic. Nowadays you can have an STM8 with two dozen 10 or 12-bit ADCs and enough grunt to do hundreds of PID loops at once for 10 cents.
- jerf 3y agoMy understanding is that there was a period of time where computer science was very excited about fuzzy logic, because it was thought it would prove to be more powerful than conventional logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic However, it was demonstrated that it had no additional power over conventional logic, so interest faded as quickly as it rose. Which is not to say it is useless, but that rather than a revolution it became just another tool in the belt. It can be more convenient to formulate certain systems in fuzzy logic rather than binary logic, but it doesn't really create new possibilities. And programmers in the trenches were doing this sort of thing already anyhow, less formally, but generally effectively. It was weird how loud it was for sure. New forms of logic don't generally get the red carpet treatment like that. I don't know why a rice cooker would particularly care about "fuzzy logic" other than a bizarre marketing spandrel [1]. [1]: Since this seems an obscure usage of an already-obscure term: https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/what-are-spandrels.html https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/what-are-spandrels....
- jbverschoor 3y agoControl theory is very interesting and in my opinion more relevant than before
- avidiax 3y agoFuzzy logic sounds like it has been superseded by neural networks. It has much the same principle, i.e. gates/neurons that are tuned to provide a non-digital output. But with fuzzy logic, presumably the parameters and network are hand tuned.
- sunshowers 3y agoI don't think "superseded" is the right word, in the same way that ordinary relativity [1] hasn't been superseded by special or general relativity. Fuzzy logic is a more straightforward model that works well enough here, so why throw in the additional complexity and illegibility of neural nets? [1] Also known as "classical mechanics". Despite widespread belief that relativity is a 20th century idea, the first person to describe relativity wasn't Einstein -- it was Galileo. Einstein himself saw his work on relativity as extending what Galileo had done.
- barbazoo 3y ago> Step 2 - Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi In hindsight, I wouldn't want to install HA for the sole purpose of running one smart plug. HA is one of the best pieces of software I've worked with but it has a learning curve and it does require some tinkering every now and then.
- edent 3y agoI should have mentioned, I have HA for all sorts of different things - not just this plug.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOn the other hand, HA tends to act as an attractor for this kind of stuff. I installed mine first to play with Hue lights, then to try and add my A/C units to it. With the latter turning into a spectacular success (infinitely better than vendor's garbage app, plus actually liked and used by my wife), HA now also runs hacked IKEA air quality monitors, floor heating, and most recently, reports when the washing machine is done. It's now pretty much critical infrastructure for us.
- frereubu 3y agoThe alternative to this is to buy an expensive rice cooker like a mug (me) and after a few months realise that the last 20-odd minutes on the display go down much faster than 20 minutes. Fuzzy logic indeed.
- marssaxman 3y agoI have a clothes dryer which works like that, the other way around: equipped with an intelligent controller and an array of moisture sensors, it will spend 40 minutes chugging through the last 10 minutes of its cycle before presenting a load of washing which is just barely damp enough that you're not sure whether it's actually done.
- freeplay 3y agoMy rice cooker switches to "keep warm" mode once it's done cooking. I think most do this. Is the drop in power consumption significant enough to reliably know when its done?
- geor9e 3y agoHaha, I read the headline and my brain went "I bet it's a Energy Monitoring Smart Plug on Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi". Honestly a simple automation with device trigger: smartplug "power changes" with below: X watts might have worked too if it only crosses in that direction once per cook. But it's nice that a fancy appliance monitoring add-on exists - some appliances probably have a few weird power cycles per cook.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvelagal 3y agobeep beep beep. They have alarms for that ! :) But nice fun project !
- vundercind 3y agoAnd keep-warm. Most of the reason I use a rice cooker is so I don’t need to monitor it or try very hard to time the finish right.
- djhworld 3y agoNeat! I was always under the impression that rice cookers worked on a timer basis, but from the article it sounds like it's more of a thing where the appliance will tell you when the rice is cooked - is that right? I'm intrigued to get one now, although it's unclear to me what the difference is between a £40 one and the one mentioned in the post (which looks to be about £100 now on Amazon)
- doctoring 3y agoI love rice cookers! Rice cookers (usually) make clever use of 1) alloys whose magnetism depends on temperature and 2) the fact that boiling water occurs at a fixed temperature. With a "trigger" temperature just above the boiling point of water, the rice cooker automatically turns off the heating element when all the water is gone (and thus the temperature starts to rise above boiling point). More detail here: https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI
- SamBam 3y agoThose are the older ones. The new ones like the "Fuzzy Logic" line are more akin to a PID controller trying to make the temperature/time graph match a specific curve, where the temperature changes at different points in the cooking, if I understand correctly.
- mauvehaus 3y agoI'd like to see a patent that actually confirms this. The Curie temperature of the common ferromagnetic metals is well above the boiling point of water, which raises some questions as to what one would make the alloy out of. Canadian nickels were made of nickel until 1981. Assuming you have a magnet that's heat resistant, you can do a cool demo with a torch or gas stove: pick up the coin with the magnet and dangle it in the flames. You'll know when it hits the Curie temperature. It'll fall off the magnet.
- ambichook 3y agobimetallic strip doesnt necessarily mean magnetism, i believe in this case it simply deforms to flip a switch
- entropie 3y agoI do the same with my washer. I monitor the power usage, save it in a variable and run a trigger when it drops from a certain amount below another. Super simple, works good.
- enobrev 3y agoSame. I have my washer / dryer set up to notify us when they're done. I also have my automated cat pan hooked up, which incrents a counter and once that counter hits a threshold we get a notification that it's time to change the box.
- LorenPechtel 3y agoHey, big companies--there's a market for this! Why is there no commercial product that does something of the sort? Power drops below X watts for Y minutes, send notification.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoDon't tip them off, they'll make something that requires a cloud service and records every time you cook rice.
- kjs3 3y agoAnd fills all of your social media, Amazon, eBay, etc. with ads for rice, products made with rice, rice adjacent 'influencers' and travel to places where rice is grown via "we value your privacy (for the money we make from it)" affiliate data sharing. It's all spelled out in the click-thru ToC...you have noone to blame but yourself for not reading all 132 pages. /s
- ranger207 3y agoThat doesn't scale. What, you sell someone a product, they're happy with it, it fulfills the problem they had, they don't send you another penny until you spend the money to actually make a new product? That sounds too expensive, nobody would fund that
- fngjdflmdflg 3y agoThis idea doesn't sound like that though. Current rice cookers are already what you describe. A rice cooker with an app would be more likely to have a subscription model.
- kjellsbells 3y agoAlternative implementation idea: pi with a mike feeding audio signals to a detector. If waveform matches Twinkle Little Star (aka sound of rice cooker), send notif("rice is done"). Extensible to other important sounds like smoke alarm, oven timer beeping, and a catch-all that sends notif("weird sound in kitchen, best investigate"). Plugin architecture to allow other contributions for waveforms to recognise different brand gear, eg the beeps from GE being different from Zojirushi.
- mjdiloreto 3y agoEnergy use for constant audio monitoring would make that implementation impractical compared to simply monitoring the energy draw from the device.
- tnmom 3y agoA Pi draws somewhere under 10W at peak, probably significantly under that most of the time. That’s about 87kWh per year, worst case. Something like $8-16 dollars depending on how incompetent your power company is - well under the threshold for anyone who knows how to do this kind of work to worry about. Again, worst case; I’d bet you can do constant listening half that.
- Void_Kitty 3y agoYou could probably run this on a 32bit micro controller doing less than a watt
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoYeah I want that for detecting when my furnace cycles. One mic could probably cover everything in the utility room. With multiple outdoor microphones I'd love to build a ShotSpotter, but I'm not good enough at audio to know how practical that is.
- madphilosopher 3y agoFor a forced-air furnace, I put a hinged piece of cardboard over a room vent with a paperclip switch. When the furnace blew, the cardboard would rise and the switch would open. Simple and effective. It doesn't measure the burn cycle of the furnace exactly, but it was close enough for me.
- syntaxing 3y agoHome assistant uses some weird “code in YAML” syntax. Chances are, the author could have written a virtual binary sensor by making one that turns on off according to the meter. I found that chatGPT makes writing these yaml files significantly better and faster.
- mbirth 3y agoNo need for YAML, you can add binary sensors from the “Helper” tab of any device’s entities list.
- mrkpdl 3y agoThe talkie toaster from Red Dwarf comes to mind… “Does anyone want toast?”
- blt 3y agoIn my Cuckoo rice cooker it's better to let the rice sit in "keep warm" for a few minutes anyway. When the cooker detects "done" there is no water left on the bottom but the rice grains still aren't finished absorbing all the water on their surface. I haven't noticed any big quality dropoff, even 1hr is fine.
- carabiner 3y agoThe person who invents a fully automated home rice cooker (rinses the rice, puts it in a pot, adds water and cooks) will be a billionaire. I want to start my rice cooker while I'm driving home from a big hike and have that steaming pot ready when I get home.
- BakaRakuda 3y agoThey already made it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmiJ0OzFKd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmiJ0OzFKd0
- carabiner 3y agoMother of god.
- chewxy 3y agoA good thing about living in a small house. I can hear when my rice cooker is done (plays a tune), when my washing machine is done (plays a tune), when my dryer is done (plays a tune). :) (note that that hasn't prevented me from hooking them up to smart plugs the way terrence did)
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoCan someone explain? Why is a rice cooker needed? Like, why a special pot to cook rice, specifially? I eat plenty of rice -basmati, brown basmati, brown long-grain, carolina, bomba paella, arborio, etc etc. I boil it in a simple pot where I also boil everything else. It cooks just fine. I make pilafs (in my French oven!), Greek stuffed veg, egg fried rice (with last day's rice obviously), risotto, Persian tahdig with saffron, you name it. I really don't think there's ever any problem with my rice. So why is everyone using special cookers? What's the secret?
- stavros 3y agoI can't be arsed watching the pot.
- dtgriscom 3y agoConcise, accurate, and to the point.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoAnd how do you make dolmades avgolemono re man?
- stavros 3y agoIn a rice cooker, of course!
- paranoidrobot 3y ago> I boil it in a simple pot Maybe the difference is this. Boiled rice gives you one type of rice. It is relatively easy, but I know a lot of people tend to want the softer fluffier rice cooked using the absorption-method. Rice cookers are doing absorption-method cooking. This is slightly more technically complex - the exact ratio of water to rice is important, as is controlling temperature. I consider myself a reasonably competent home cook. I cook rice fairly regularly on a stove top, but getting the exact ratio of water to rice correct is something I find is very easy to mess up. Additionally, my current stove is fiddly, and hard to control the exact temperature. Sometimes I will end up with a situation where the rice has fully used all of the water, but is not cooked through, other times I will end up with rice that is fully cooked, but is still quite wet. When trying to time this with other dishes, it's painful. I don't have anywhere convenient to store a rice cooker, so I don't have one - but when I renovate my kitchen in the future it will be one appliance I end up getting.
- yen223 3y agoThis is the "put in weeks of work to save minutes of your time" kind of automation that I absolutely love and wish I did more of
- happyopossum 3y agoHow about we don’t?
- a_subsystem 3y agoI've been experimenting with some home automation using Home Assistant recently. Its scope is absolutely incredible. Some open source friendly brands are Sonoff, Shelly, and Athom. Would be really sweet if there was an Awesome Open Source Home Assistant git some day. =)
- beryilma 3y ago> Is this worth it? I like playing with gadgets - so yes. It is only worth it because it lets you play with gadgets. Otherwise, one can only have so much attention span. I would go nuts if my home appliances started sending me push notifications. This is just a dumb trend in my opinion. Just because you can does not mean you should.
- prmoustache 3y agoIf you don't like to play with gadgets, you don't even have appliances. I am still cooking my rice in a saucepan.
- Dwedit 3y agoHow about a special kind of ammeter that makes a noise when the current drawn goes below a particular threshold? (Possibly for a minimum time length) You can make any appliance beep that way.
- voussoir 3y agoHere's Matthias Wandel doing something like that with his microwave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqpNI7q1Dc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqpNI7q1Dc
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]