Guy and Seth on Simulink

February 28th, 2012

Sous-vide Cooking with Simulink Part 2

Here is the continuation of my sous-vide cooking story I began to tell in the last post.

Hardware Implementation

As described last week, I finally received everything I ordered:

I dusted off my soldering iron and soldered a cable to the LM35. Then I dipped the extremity into silicone to make it waterproof. With everything connected to the Arduino, my circuit looks like this:

Schematic of my sous-vide setup

Yeah... I know, a Tupperware is not the best container for a micro-controller. But I thought it would help avoiding to drop water on the Arduino.

Software Implementation

With everything connected to the Arduino, all that remained was to program a controller. I installed the Simulink Support Package for Arduino.

Update: This model was created using MATLAB R2011b. Since R2012a Simulink provides built-in support for prototyping, testing, and running models on low-cost target hardware, including Arduino®, LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, and BeagleBoard.

Within just a few minutes, I created the following model and uploaded it on the Arduino:

Simulink model of the Arduino controller

While this is running on the target, I can monitor the process on my PC using another model:

Simulink model of the Arduino controller

Cooking Time

I mixed a nice rub and vacuum-sealed a bunch of pork ribs.

Vacuum sealed pork ribs

I left them to cook for 24 hours at 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

My ribs cooking

I was so excited when it was time to take them out that I forgot to take pictures. I put them in the oven at broil for 2 minutes, just to give a little crunch on the top.

Believe me... that was totally worth the effort. Next time I'll try the 72 hours brisket!

Now it's your turn

Do you use Simulink on the weekend? What is your most unexpected usage of Simulink? Leave a comment here.

Author picture

By Guy Rouleau

16:58 UTC | Posted in Controls, Fun, Fundamentals, Model-Based Design | Permalink | 3 Comments »

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Sous-vide Cooking with Simulink Part 2”

  1. Karthik replied on February 28th, 2012 at 23:43 UTC :

    What a Guy! Although I am a vegetarian and thus don’t know much about pork ribs let alone cooking it, I think Simulink rocks and so does this Guy! :-)

  2. Wintersprite replied on February 29th, 2012 at 06:12 UTC :

    To be honest, the last thing I need to do on a weekend is spend more time sitting in front of a computer. “Sitting is the new Smoking,” so they say. However, I find reports on ways to use Simulink for practical home purposes very interesting, and I could imagine making the effort if the right idea (I don’t know what that is) were presented.

  3. samil replied on March 1st, 2012 at 05:06 UTC :

    Just as I started to get interested in hobby electronics, and particularly the Arduino, it was a pleasant surprise to see this post. Could you please post more projects that use Simulink and Arduino?

Leave a Reply

Wrap code fragments inside <pre> tags, like this:

<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

If you have a "<" character in your code, either follow it with a space or replace it with "&lt;" (including the semicolon).
MathWorks

About

Guy Rouleau and Seth Popinchalk are Application Engineers for MathWorks. They write here about Simulink and other MathWorks tools used in Model-Based Design.

Subscribe


Blog Admin

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of MathWorks.