Alternative 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.
This can detect an inductive load like an AC/fridge/freezer compressor or washing machine motor. Something small and purely resistive like a rice cooker might be more challenging, but certainly a Sense does get you a long way.
A 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.
For 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.
I 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!
My 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.
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].
Fuzzy 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Mine 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.
I'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.
A 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)
My 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?
In 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.
The 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.
I 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.
> 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.
On 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.
Can 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?
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.
Thanks for the insight. I didn't know what "absorption-method cooking" is so I looked it up online and it's how I cook rice, or at least how I cook rice when it's not part of a dish that has to be cooked as one. A couple of guides I found online even use a normal pot, with a more or less precise measurement of water. In my experience, exact measurements are not something a human palate can do, and I think there is a lot of posturing in recipe writers who insist on such, most of the time - with the exception of baking and emulsions, although even there the variability in the ingredients themselves introduces a lot of uncertainty.
Maybe a rice cooker can make exact measurements, but again I would have to wonder: who was the superhuman tester who detected the perfectly cooked rice, that everyone on earth will indisputably recognise as perfect? For me, cooking is not science and I think I'd feel a bit silly having a scientific instrument for rice cooking. So, I guess, it's not for me.
Load up big batch of rice when convenient, rice cooks at set schedule. No minding the stove.
Keep warm option can keep rice 95% tasty for 3-4 days vs storing/reheating rice that gets dry. Rice quality also consistently good.
Depending on how much rice you eat, this will save you multiple hours a week. Hundreds of hours over a few years. It's really no brainer investment.
It's like asking why do people have toasters when they can fry up or bake bread every time. Except high end toasters have nothing on high end rice cookers. Imagine a toaster that can be loaded with bread and you can open it whenever and have perfectly toasted bread for days. I imagine frequent bread eaters would pay stupid money for that.
E: if your clumbsy, never accidentally burn a pot again, which adds up.
I see, thanks for the insight. Well, you're replying to someone who makes her own bread, and her own everything else [1] so I at least understand why I don't have a rice cooker now!
I enjoy cooking and I don't think of it as a waste of time, like "hundreds of hours over a few years". Those are hundreds of hours where I get to do something I love and that I find rewarding, physically so. My average time spent on cooking is about an hour, or an hour and a half, depending on the dish, I reckon. But then I'll eat that for a couple of days, so it's an hour for four meals; for two people. My partner also cooks so it's not always me spending that time.
Of course for some lunches I'll just make myself a toastie or puff up some noodles and eat them with tuna. Maybe give them a quick fry if I really feel like it.
Anyway I guess this thread has helped convince me I don't need a rice cooker in my life. I do have a toaster though :)
______________
[1] Except for beans and chickpeas. Not if I can buy a can of perfectly boiled chickpeas at 0.45 p. The power to cook that on a stove will cost me more and it's probably better for the environment given the people who put the chickpeas in the can boil them in batches of several hundreds of kgs, not 1kg as I'd do.
You can definitely toast bread using a pan but you'll find it difficult to get the same consistency and it's also more hassle and cleaning.
That being said, is there really much difference between a 100$ vs 400$+ rice cooker? I've been trying to find a reason to upgrade my cheap(ish) Panasonic to something like a Zojirushi but every time I look into it I just can't justify the expense.
In our house plain rice is a staple eaten with almost every meal and often associated with non-time-intensive meal prep (like reheating leftovers or eaten with eggs and some other toppings). So we like being able to start the rice and walk away.
Using our rice cooker makes "making rice" a 1 minute labor effort with absolutely no monitoring needed. You can't burn it. You're welcome to forget about it. You can barely mess it up.
In our case the rice maker is a 25 year old simple magnet kind. Not one of the expensive pressure cookers. This style of rice maker can be bought for as little as ~$30 and is super-convenient if you eat a lot of rice. Just don't get the non-stick pots if you buy one - they aren't needed and they don't last for more than a couple of years.
Thanks! I think one reason why I don't feel the convenience is because I usually don't cook rice on its own. Most of the time it goes in casseroles, pilafs, risottos, stuffed veg and things like that where it doesn't make sense to boil the rice separately (although sometimes it makes sense to parboil it). I did use to eat plenty of plain rice in the past, but I got into cooking more and more over the years and I don't eat plain rice that much anymore.
Grew up with a rice cooker in the house and it was used frequently. I actually didn’t buy a rice cooker as an adult until two months ago - and always made it stovetop. Was resistant and proud to just make it on the stove.
Cannot believe it took me so long to buy a rice cooker and wish I’d done it sooner. It just makes it way easier and more reproducible to make perfect rice. Plus some have a steamer tray and other features.
Knowing how to make it stove top is a good skill but prefer a rice cooker now.
It’s funny though - my family is mixed race with some being Asian and others being from Spain/Western Europe. Rice Can be prepared in so many different ways - paella has its own pan and cooking method that’s just as valid as a rice cooker.
They’re just different but rice cooker for daily use for me.
The secret is it's cultural. Asian people eat a lot of rice. when you do, it makes sense to optimize the boring part, which is watching rice cook. this frees you to cook delicious entrees to go with the rice. Or cook means in the rice cooker. For whiter audiences that don't eat as much rice, but do eat bread, a toaster is the equivalent device. you could toast bread in a pan, why don't you? you could load it up with all sorts of stuff that way. But most people have a toaster.
the secret is labor saving devices. if you don't do a ton of that sort of labor, it doesn't make sense. My rice cooker spends more time with rice in it that I eat, than not.
I think a pan is for frying bread, not toasting it. Or to make flat breads. Anyway I see the point, thanks. I do eat lots of rice, btw, except not plain and this thread has given me to understand that this is an important detail I've been missing.
A while ago I met a guy from Argentina (on the night train from Paris to Venice, where you meet all sorts of interesting folk) and he was complaining about the plain white rice he eats in China, where he goes often for work. He told me he absolutely loves rice and when he went to China for the first time, he was thinking to himself "oh boy, here I'll eat the best rice!". And was very disappointed to find out that the Chinese eat their rice plain white. I thought he should have gone to Iran, where they really go the distance when it comes to cooking rice, and making it a very special thing.
So I guess if you are coming from the more far-east side of Asia then a rice cooker makes sense, but if you're used to pilafs, tahdigs and biryanis and things like that, then it's probably not very useful.
For the same reason why someone might have a toaster just for bread.
In Asian households it's common for us to be eating rice everyday, with side dishes. So it's also really common for us to have rice cookers for convenience.
I imagine another reason why rice specifically is the physics behind it. Water has a property where it won't get hotter than it's boiling point while it's boiling.
The way they cook rice is: put rice and water in a pot, boil water until there's no water left, take it off the heat. Because of that property, making a rice maker is extremely cheap. It's just a heating element and a thermostat that switches the element off when the temperature is 101 degrees C (because while there's water, it will only ever be 100 degrees C).
Yeah, I've definitely live in some places :cough Paris cough: where two stove heads are the norm. I can see the point in having an extra place to cook in that case.
Readit News
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.
I have one in the kitchen (which is near the laundry), and another one in my office (where I cannot hear the things in the kitchen).
When things beep, the one in the office says "beep beep".
And if things beep for a long time -- I think it's 2 minutes or something -- it also notifies my phone.
This can detect an inductive load like an AC/fridge/freezer compressor or washing machine motor. Something small and purely resistive like a rice cooker might be more challenging, but certainly a Sense does get you a long way.
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.
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.
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!
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....
If I head to head my zojirushi vs a bargain rice cooker with temperature detector, would I be able to tell the difference?
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.
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.
So why is everyone using special cookers? What's the secret?
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.
https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t...
https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...
Maybe a rice cooker can make exact measurements, but again I would have to wonder: who was the superhuman tester who detected the perfectly cooked rice, that everyone on earth will indisputably recognise as perfect? For me, cooking is not science and I think I'd feel a bit silly having a scientific instrument for rice cooking. So, I guess, it's not for me.
Life with $400+ high end rice cooker:
Load up big batch of rice when convenient, rice cooks at set schedule. No minding the stove.
Keep warm option can keep rice 95% tasty for 3-4 days vs storing/reheating rice that gets dry. Rice quality also consistently good.
Depending on how much rice you eat, this will save you multiple hours a week. Hundreds of hours over a few years. It's really no brainer investment.
It's like asking why do people have toasters when they can fry up or bake bread every time. Except high end toasters have nothing on high end rice cookers. Imagine a toaster that can be loaded with bread and you can open it whenever and have perfectly toasted bread for days. I imagine frequent bread eaters would pay stupid money for that.
E: if your clumbsy, never accidentally burn a pot again, which adds up.
I enjoy cooking and I don't think of it as a waste of time, like "hundreds of hours over a few years". Those are hundreds of hours where I get to do something I love and that I find rewarding, physically so. My average time spent on cooking is about an hour, or an hour and a half, depending on the dish, I reckon. But then I'll eat that for a couple of days, so it's an hour for four meals; for two people. My partner also cooks so it's not always me spending that time.
Of course for some lunches I'll just make myself a toastie or puff up some noodles and eat them with tuna. Maybe give them a quick fry if I really feel like it.
Anyway I guess this thread has helped convince me I don't need a rice cooker in my life. I do have a toaster though :)
______________
[1] Except for beans and chickpeas. Not if I can buy a can of perfectly boiled chickpeas at 0.45 p. The power to cook that on a stove will cost me more and it's probably better for the environment given the people who put the chickpeas in the can boil them in batches of several hundreds of kgs, not 1kg as I'd do.
You can definitely toast bread using a pan but you'll find it difficult to get the same consistency and it's also more hassle and cleaning.
That being said, is there really much difference between a 100$ vs 400$+ rice cooker? I've been trying to find a reason to upgrade my cheap(ish) Panasonic to something like a Zojirushi but every time I look into it I just can't justify the expense.
In our house plain rice is a staple eaten with almost every meal and often associated with non-time-intensive meal prep (like reheating leftovers or eaten with eggs and some other toppings). So we like being able to start the rice and walk away.
Using our rice cooker makes "making rice" a 1 minute labor effort with absolutely no monitoring needed. You can't burn it. You're welcome to forget about it. You can barely mess it up.
In our case the rice maker is a 25 year old simple magnet kind. Not one of the expensive pressure cookers. This style of rice maker can be bought for as little as ~$30 and is super-convenient if you eat a lot of rice. Just don't get the non-stick pots if you buy one - they aren't needed and they don't last for more than a couple of years.
Cannot believe it took me so long to buy a rice cooker and wish I’d done it sooner. It just makes it way easier and more reproducible to make perfect rice. Plus some have a steamer tray and other features.
Knowing how to make it stove top is a good skill but prefer a rice cooker now.
It’s funny though - my family is mixed race with some being Asian and others being from Spain/Western Europe. Rice Can be prepared in so many different ways - paella has its own pan and cooking method that’s just as valid as a rice cooker.
They’re just different but rice cooker for daily use for me.
the secret is labor saving devices. if you don't do a ton of that sort of labor, it doesn't make sense. My rice cooker spends more time with rice in it that I eat, than not.
A while ago I met a guy from Argentina (on the night train from Paris to Venice, where you meet all sorts of interesting folk) and he was complaining about the plain white rice he eats in China, where he goes often for work. He told me he absolutely loves rice and when he went to China for the first time, he was thinking to himself "oh boy, here I'll eat the best rice!". And was very disappointed to find out that the Chinese eat their rice plain white. I thought he should have gone to Iran, where they really go the distance when it comes to cooking rice, and making it a very special thing.
So I guess if you are coming from the more far-east side of Asia then a rice cooker makes sense, but if you're used to pilafs, tahdigs and biryanis and things like that, then it's probably not very useful.
In Asian households it's common for us to be eating rice everyday, with side dishes. So it's also really common for us to have rice cookers for convenience.
And you can also do dishes in it. E.g. put some pork ribs on top of the rice. You get a complete meal in one step.
The way they cook rice is: put rice and water in a pot, boil water until there's no water left, take it off the heat. Because of that property, making a rice maker is extremely cheap. It's just a heating element and a thermostat that switches the element off when the temperature is 101 degrees C (because while there's water, it will only ever be 100 degrees C).
Dead Comment