I am planning to use HA to augment a $20 rice cooker into a much more useful cooking tool:
- Smart rice cooker: cook rice better (like the $150-$200 models), turn on on my way back home, etc.
- Sous vide cooker to cook steak to perfect level.
- Hot spring egg cooker: perfect egg yolk softness to my taste.
- Temperature controlled deep fryer: never burns the food.
- etc
I am comfortable with writing program or tinkering electronics. But I am still relatively new to HA and need your input on tools/component to use and best practice.
Features planned:
- Basic temperature control
- Recipe programming (e.g. 60C for 30 min, raise an alert for adding one more ingredient, then bring to boil, and finally keep it at 75 for another 120 min, etc)
- Some form of recipe library that people can share their cook recipe programming. (optional at the beginning)
Where I am now:
I have already prototyped rice cooker part with
- a temperature sensor powered by a WeMos D1 board
- and Kasa smart switch
- modified $20 rice cooker.
and samsung smartthings. With temp control, the rice cooked is much better (close to that from a $200 cooker).
I am moving to HA because
- Smartthings solution has too much development overhead with limited capability.
- Smartthings solution relies on internet connection to work which brings latency and reliability concern for temperature control.
Current plan
- ESPHome + NodeMCU driving thermal resistor and a relay module as the hardware. (this part is roughly done, thanks to the very-easy-to-use ESPHOME)
- All cooking logic / UI implemented in HA.
I need suggestion on
- What to use to implement the “recipe”, which is roughtly temperature control scheduling + UI interaction? I have looked the action in automation, but found it quite limiting in capability. Also starting to look at pyscript. It is more powerful, but the logic is more opaque to user.
- How to connect the “recipe” to UI element? I am a novice in front end. My current knowledge stops at using a “virtual” switch to trigger a pyscript that cooks a particular recipe. I would like user to be able to select recipe and use a single switch to start. Also have more visibility, seeing how much time left, get notification when attention is needed etc.
- A way to “program” the recipe that is able to be share among users.
Any input will be appreciated. Thanks!