 I have this bread maker. As it is far too big to appear on the workbench, let me just disassemble it so I can show you the interesting bits. Here we have the oven. It is a heated bucket with a heating element which you can see here, which for some reason has no insulation on the outside for maximum inefficiency. Here there is a linear induction motor, mains powered. This turns a pulley system underneath that in turn turns this. This slots into the bottom of the actual heating can thing that goes in here and turns a paddle. Over here we have the electronics that runs it. There are two boards. There's this yellow one and underneath there's the green one. The yellow one is the high voltage board. This has got the mains power supply for the low voltage board, a relay for operating the heating element, and a thyristor, I believe. This controls the motor. The motor only runs at a single speed because it's a synchronous mains motor. So in order to turn the paddle slowly it gets pulsed on and off at brief intervals. The low voltage logic board underneath, which I haven't taken apart yet, contains the control panel and the microcontroller that does all the sequencing, LCD and buttons. In terms of sensing, it doesn't have a lot. There is a single temperature sensor, which is this thing here, that plugs into this sensor connection here, and there's these, which are a fusible link which is used for emergency power off if the bucket gets too hot, marked fuse, which is this connector here. And that's all there is to it. The whole thing operates by basically brute force. The microcontroller knows nothing about what's going on in the bucket other than the temperature, time, and nothing else. So the context is that I have just upgraded to a bigger and better bread maker. So this one is now surplus to requirements, which means what is there ridiculously poorly advised that I can do with this thing? I've removed the boards from the machine for a closer inspection. The low voltage board contains very little of actual interest. There's a ubiquitous microcontroller here, which if for some reason isn't blobbed, so I can actually read the number on it, but I've tried looking it up and I've got nowhere. It's probably a 8-bit microcontroller with a handful of bytes of memory. We've got the LCD, some buttons, and this tiny chip here, which I can't read the number of, but has probably got to do with, I was about to say running the LCD, but I now notice it's connected around here to the buttons, so it might be a port multiplier for those. The high voltage board contains a bit more of interest. We've got the relay, we've got whatever that is. We've got a couple of hopefully class Y capacitors used for the switch mode supply, switch mode supply controller. This used to be a buzzer, but when I first got the machine I removed it because the buzzer was incredibly annoying. If we turn it over, try and avoid glare, we can actually see all these slots. These are isolation slots separating the low voltage side of things, which is over here, from the high voltage side of things, which is up here. Main's comes in here, is regulated, it gets turned into probably about 5 volts, and is used to drive the rest of the system. So for example, if we look at this relay, which I believe is used to control the heater, we can see that it is nicely isolated from the low voltage side by these slots, except for this pin here, because this will be the mains coming in or out, the other side of it will be here, and while these two pins will be the low voltage used to actually turn the relay on and off, so if you follow these tracks, the extra solder here is because this is a high power track, increases the current. That connects to this pin, which, what do we know it, is part of the connector marked heat, so that will be power out to the heater. This will be probably live, that connects up to this fuse, which will be connected across to here, which is, yes, it's the live pin of the mains input. So the power transistor thing, this thing, is these three pins, you can see there is another slot, indicating that this side is low voltage and this side is high voltage. So, yeah, that's used to control the motor. Here are the three pins controlling the motor. One of them goes to the power thing, whatever it is, while these two connect to, well, this one is clearly the low voltage, this one is connected through here to the high voltage side, so that's probably neutral slash ground. Okay, that is interesting, because the fact that there is a connection all the way through from the high voltage side to the low voltage side indicates that this probably isn't an isolated supply. What this means is, if I were to plug this in, there's a decent chance that all the low voltage side of things will actually be floating at mains voltage, which would be bad if I were to poke it with, you know, a finger. This would have been safe enough because all this was inside a big plastic box. That is actually kind of disappointing. What I was hoping to do was to figure out the pinout here, unplug the low voltage board, like so, plug in my own microcontroller, and that would give me direct access to the sensor, the heater control, and the motor control, so I can now drive all the useful bits of the bread maker using this board, and this board would also provide me a power supply. But if this is not an isolated supply, I am rather less keen on doing that. Let's abandon the PCBs for a bit and take a look at the bucket and motor. This is a stock single phase induction motor. Three wires, presumably positive, negative, and ground. I am not particularly up to speed with these things and don't really want to have to deal with it. They are a paint drive, and you need one of these monster capacitors in order to actually start them. The motor is connected to this belt system for gearing it down, so the motor doesn't have to push the enormously stiff paddle through the dough itself. It can spin at a much higher speed, and the pulley gears it down to provide more torque. I successfully removed the circuit clip without it pinging across the room. So the pulley here should therefore just pull off and manage to loosen it so this bit just comes off, and the rest of the pulley is fastened onto the post in some other exotic fashion. Anyway, here is the induction motor. This is a fan to keep it cool. It's quite heavy. As I say, I don't really have anything to do with these things, so it says 80 watts, which is a fairly powerful motor. So if I want to do anything with this machine, I'm going to have to find another motor of equivalent power in order to be able to successfully knead dough. In the interest of science, I have reassembled it all up to a point. I'm going to plug this in and turn it on because I need to know how fast this motor is and what the step down gear is. So what I'm going to do is capture some footage of it at 60 frames a second and then go through it and count frames to see how long it will take these markers to go around. And that should, I hope, let me figure out how fast the motor is. Probably about a thousand RPM, so that's not supposed to happen. Now, as I said before, this thing has a floating power supply, which means that when it's turned on, all the low voltage stuff under here will be live. This is earthed. I made sure to reattach the earth cable, so this should be fine. All right, here we are. It's turned on. It's currently set to basic. So if I press the button, it's faster than I was thinking. Okay, I just had it run on one of the programs and it stopped pulsing and it is now running at full speed. And I just hope I'm getting some actual data out of this. I did, in fact, get some data. If I go through the video frame by frame, I can see that the yellow mark on the large wheel, which is only just visible due to motion blur, takes about 11 frames to go around. So let's do some maths. We're recording this at 30 frames per second, which means each frame is about 0.03 of a second. Therefore, 11 frames gives us a total rotational period of about 0.4 seconds. From this, we can calculate the speed in RPM and revolutions per second of the big wheel. But we're not actually interested in the big wheel. We're interested in the motor itself. So by measuring the sizes of the large and small wheels, this allows us to figure out the gear ratio of the pulley system. From there, a simple multiplication will let us figure out the rotational speed of the motor. That is, the motor has to turn this fast to get the large wheel rotating the speed we measured. Luckily, the motor has its power rating written on the label on the side, which is 80 watts. So by using a calculation which I looked up online and don't actually understand, we can calculate that the motor's maximum torque is 0.61 Newton meters. This is useful because now I can look up online and by myself, a much easier to control DC motor that produces about the same amount of torque. Some toys from China have just arrived. So what we've got here is two electric motors plus the controller boards. The reason why I have two of each is I've additionally ordered a brushed electric motor, note two wires, and a brushless motor controller, note lots of connections, and received a nice email from the people from AliExpress. I ordered it from saying that this wouldn't work. So I then ended up ordering a brushed motor controller and brushless motor, note lots of wires. Now I have both sets like that. So let's fire them up and see if they work. Here it is all wired up. I'm intending to run this off a 19 volt laptop power supply. So I have my bench power supply set to 19 volts. So let's turn it on. Okay, we've got a green light. Press the switch. That's going round. Well, that seems to work. It's a little bit gritty. This motor has a built-in gearbox to step it down. It says 800 rpm. The other motor is noticeably smaller, so either brushless motors are more powerful for the size, which might be true, or else they sent me a underspect motor. Well, the brushed motor and power supply all seem to work fine. It'll run in both directions, which is nice. Although the gearbox is noticeably more gritty running in reverse. I like the fact it's got a switch on it. I like the fact that the knob is on an extension lead. So this should work fine. Let's see if I can make the other one work. Okay, this one was significantly harder to wire up due to there being more wires. This one is disconnected. This one seems to be a sensor line which lets the motor control know how fast the motor is turning, which this controller doesn't do. But we have positive, negative pulse width modulation line for changing the speed, and a line marked positive negative that seems to control the direction. Anyway, assuming it's wired up correctly, let's power it on. That's nice. That's changing the direction of rotation. Good lot of torque there, I have to say. What does this one do? Ah, high low speed. No, maximum speed. That switches it from pulse width modulation mode to flat out. So in terms of motors, I think I'm going to go with the brushed motor as I think this is higher specced. And I suspect I'm going to need all the torque I can get. The brushless motor is interesting and I'm going to keep that for another project. But I think that this one will be both more suited for what I want it for. And given its larger footprint, it should also be easier to mount into the machine. Well, I have it bodged into place. The original belt cog designed for the induction motor wants a much bigger shaft than this thing's got, so I had to 3D print one. This is kind of a prototype, given that this stuff softens at about 180 and that I'm going to be running the oven, here at maybe 200. That's not really a long term solution, but it is enough to demonstrate that the thing works. Let me just up the power. Ouch, the noise. Okay, I think a lot of that's coming from the gearbox, but still that's just too loud. I suppose that is one advantage of these things. No gearbox, no contacts or anything. I think that I am going to give the other motor, wherever it's got to, here it is, a try. This might be lower power, but it's a brushless motor and I suppose there's a potential that it'll be quieter. We will see. After a fair bit of effort on my third try, I successfully made a mount for this motor out of the top of a tin can. I only cut myself once on it too. Not a very big cut. Anyway, it works. Let me try and get this thing on camera and focused. Here is the motor controller. So that is as fast as it goes. That's not very fast. I am very much not convinced that this motor is 85 watts. I am very convinced that it is not 85 watts. It does seem to be providing a whole lot of torque. I can't actually stop this wheel moving and if I try, eventually the belt slips. Like so. Here we have 75 grams of flour, some salt and some oil, and I've got some water to put in it. Let's see if the paddle is actually capable of stirring this. Let's turn the power on. It's quite slow. So this is working fine. It's producing a reasonably elastic dough. It's not having any trouble with the load, but I don't think there's enough in here to warrant a decent test. So I'm going to fill this up with some more stuff and go again. I think that is actually working. I'm still not terribly pleased and I particularly don't like this little controller. It starts up in the wrong direction. That might be configurable with the jumper. It doesn't actually say what the settings are, but it will do for now. So I think I'm just going to leave it as is. I can always switch over to the other motor if necessary and move on. But first I need to put this into a dish for rising overnight. This is the other considerably hairier part of the project. This is an off-the-shelf oven controller. This is a solid-state relay. The oven controller uses this turn-heating element on and off, if I can get the thing out. It's basically a silicon relay. This is a K-type thermocouple, which is used to set the temperature. And this is the mighty heat sink required by the solid-state relay. This is all going to be responsible for maintaining the temperature in the oven. And this all runs off mains voltage. Which means I'm not very happy with it. But anyway, wiring it up should be fairly straightforward. Having looked at the manual, we connect the mains up to terminals one and two, which are nice and clearly labeled. We wire the thermocouple up to pins 10 and 11 of these two. The solid-state relay sent input, which is a 332 volt DC signal, gets wired up to pins 4 and 5. And 6 and 7 is labeled Alarm 1, and I have me able to figure out what these do. Here it is all wired up. Hopefully correctly. OK, mains input comes in here to this chocolate block. This then feeds the power supply to the timer itself. We also have a mains live output that goes to the input of the solid-state relay. The output of the solid-state relay goes through the chocolate block through this old-fashioned incandescent light bulb that is standing in for the heater and comes back out as the neutral and goes to the mains. The temperature sensor is wired up here to pins 9 and 10. So that should be all it needs. So let me try and make this thing stand up so I can see the controls. Hopefully the right way up. And then we're going to plug it in and see what happens. OK, time to turn on the power. Right. So it all seems to be working. The light's on, so it thinks that the temperature is too low and it's trying to run the heating element. The red number is the temperature it's currently detecting. The green number is the temperature that it's set to. Alarm 2 seems to indicate that it is under temperature. We have a red light here in the solid-state relay indicating that it's turned on, which is why the bulb is turned on. Now it's working, so let's turn the temperature down to 0 and it turns the element off because it's too cold. Let's just wind this up to 28. It is pulsed with modulating the heating element. Let me just put that up a bit further because this is not a heating element. This is a light bulb. Yup, that's good. It's not running the heating element for power. It is pulsing it briefly to try and get a little bit more heat in. Very nice. It's up to 99. And now it's running the heating element for power. Excellent. This all works. I'm kind of amazed, like, out of the box. I didn't have to configure it or anything. Now I have to figure out how to build it into the bread maker and hook this up to the actual heating element. By the way, this lamp is extremely shoddy. That's because I made it when I was 10. That was a long time ago. Well, here it is, all hooked up and ready to go in its janky, hot glued together glory. I have made a few changes to the design. The most noticeable being this. This is an IKEA cutlery tray that I happen to have in the back of a cupboard. The reason for this is that I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of electronics it would have to fit in the very small space in here. You can see here's a couple of holes. They were drilled to mount one of the PCBs. There was just enough space, but everything would have been really close to the hot oven compartment, which I didn't really like. Also, laying it out like this means I can separate all the low voltage side, which is this, from the high voltage side, which is this. I was planning to integrate a power supply and run everything off a single mains cable, but after this power supply gave me a shock when I was working on it, iRobot power supplies don't seem to have discharge resistors across the big capacitor. Who knew? I decided that it wasn't a good idea and also there's not really enough space, so I'm just using an external power supply that plugs in the back here. On the front, you turn this the right way up again to make sure it's all reasonably centered. We have the motor control switch, the motor control knob, a gap where the power switch is going to go and the oven controller here. Inside, we just have the compartment as usual. I pulled off this to try and, you know, expose some space for controls before I changed my mind about where everything was going to go. So let me hook up the DC supply and show you that in operation. Oh yes, another design change. I switched to the brushed motor. It wasn't so much the size and the noise, it was the fact that integrating the controls was vastly easier because they were all on wires. If I'd used the brushless motor, I would have had to desolder bits of the brushless motor controller and I just didn't want to do that. So anyway, if we turn it on, it is indeed really loud. But it's not too bad at the speeds I actually want to run this out. So if I add the paddle and the actual tray, I doubt I'll want it to go much faster than this. It will go all the way up to that, but I don't want to. And of course, it will go in reverse at which point it starts unscrewing the can. But that's not the interesting bit. The bit I actually want to demonstrate is the mains side of things. The oven controller and heating element. It's all wired up, but I haven't actually, you know, tested it yet. So let me just prepare to do that. It is hooked up and ready to go. Everything's on camera and recently sentered. The reason why I'm echoey is I'm in my kitchen. This is because, firstly, this is where cooking stuff happens. And secondly, it's on tiles, which means if it all goes horribly awesome, then I've got a minimum of burnable stuff and my fire equipment close by. Let me just get these out of the way. Okay. It is plugged into both a watt meter and a RCD. It is registering half a watt. That must be the RCD. Anyway, let's hit the button. Nothing's gone badly wrong yet. The heating element should be set to 99 degrees. 24 seems about right. Can I fuel heat? I think I can. So let's just crank down the temperature. The... Come on. So if I put that to zero, it should stop heating completely. And looking at the watt meter, it is at 1.4 watts. Okay. Let's put it up to 103. 460 watts. Yes, that is correctly operating the heating element. The temperature sensor is straight down there. Oh yeah, there's definitely heat coming off there. Which means it is immediately above the heating element. So it is going to over-register. Now, one thing I need to be aware of with this is that it is set up as an oven. The heating element does not touch the cooking can thing, which means its ability to transfer heat into the can is kind of limited. Nothing too exciting seems to be happening. So let's set this for a reasonably sane 75. It moves very rapidly. And see if it stabilizes. So not long afterwards, it has reached its target temperature of 75 and seems to be staying there almost on the dot. It's just ticked down one. Yep, I can see a pulse go through the heating element. I actually think this top light may show when the heating element's on. If I had a neon, I would hook it up just to make it a bit more obvious. So if we open the lid, lots of heat coming out, it should crank up the power. Yeah, I think it is looking at the wattmeter. All right, I believe this is all working. So there is only one thing I really need to do now, which is to try cooking with it. I don't think that is the good kind of smoke. So let's turn it all off. Of course, now I have a half made single cup cupcake. So I have turned it back on again. There is still smoke, but I think it's coming from stuff on the heating element. It is slowly dying away, even though the camera does seem to show more of it than there really is. So I am tentatively going to let it continue for a bit. As it gets up to temperature, the heating element will be energised less and less. You can see the pulsing here. And it is actually nearly there. Of course, now I realise I forgot to put any flavouring in the cupcake. There is actually another thing this could be. I oiled the pan because the bearing where the paddle goes was quite stiff. Is this just the oil burning off? That does actually seem quite likely. I've done this before. I mean, oiled it before. In order to make bread with this machine. So has it been producing all this smoke in normal operation? And I just... Alright, that is 20 minutes. I'm going to call it done. It's golden brown on the top. Yeah, smoking coming from the... Not from this. So let's have a look. So apart from the panic about the smoke, which honestly was my own fault, I think that may have actually worked. It seems to have cooked this cupcake that has completely failed to actually come loose from the side. It's possibly a bit underdone. It is a little bit doughy, but tastes pretty good actually, despite the lack of flavouring. So if I can stop it smoking, which would just be a matter of using it a few times until the oil burns off, and then replacing it with high temperature lubricant, which I should have done in the first place, then I think that works reasonably well as an oven. But I want to use the paddle as well. So I think the next experiment is going to need to boil something. I want to make French onion soup. French onion soup is an easy but laborious process. It involves caramelising onions, which basically means standing over the pot and stirring for about 45 minutes. So this is what my automation is designed to do. So let's give that a try. First step, heat. 160 degrees seems to be about the right temperature. So we crank this up to 160. And it's heating. Next step is some butter. You may need more than that. Then the onions. The recipe actually called for half a kilo of onions, which turned out to be way too many to fit in the bucket. So now all we need to do is to stir. So let's try not too fast. A little bit more than that. So now we just close the lid and wait. The temperature sensor is just past 100. But there's a lot of heat coming off it, but the butter hasn't melted yet. So I imagine the temperature in the bucket is rather lower than that. The temperature has hit 150, and it is definitely cooking. So I think I'm going to lower the thermostat to something a bit closer to where it currently is. And see if that will do. I don't want to get it too hot, you see. The paddle is continuing to go round, which is nice. Ten minutes later or so, it has really cooked down. It's well on the way to caramelizing. You can see some of the ones have got stuck on the edge. They've gone dark brown. I believe that's working. Look at the way the temperature dropped off when I opened the lid. It's actually cooked down so much. I'm wondering whether I should put the other 250 grams of onion in. I'm only going to be making about a liter of soup. So I will leave it like this, I think. So at 150, it wasn't quite hot enough to caramelize the onion. So I put it up to 160 and look what's happened. There's some rather brown bits than I was expecting, but it is looking pretty nice. So I think it's time for the next stage, which is to add the liquid. So that is wine, water and a stock cube. Now I expect the temperature to drop off very rapidly, as that is cold water. So the water is going to soak up all the heat and you can actually see it slowly dropping. I think I'm going to reduce the temperature to 110. We want it to simmer and not go into a rolling boil. So let's leave it like that and see what happens. So it's been 110 for a while and the temperature of the water is only about 66. So it is heating up but slowly. So let's just crank the temperature a bit. Also it occurs to me that I forgot a very important step, which is of course to add garlic. It is simmering and smells strongly of cooking red wine. I crank the temperature down to 110 and it continues to simmer and it's actually thickened up. I think this is done now. And here is my soup which I have to say it does smell rather nice and it tastes amazing. So I am rather pleased with that. I am surprised that the polycog didn't melt but it was still stirring all the way to the end. I will check it over again afterwards. But I think that can definitely be called a success. I can actually use this, not just to make like soup the really really hard way but for other things as well. I want to use it to make jam with because this involves heating fruit and sugar together for a long period of time, stirring slowly. I don't think it's going to work very well for anything that involves boiling water off because I would have to keep the lid open for that and I'm not sure that the 500 watt heating element is capable of keeping the can hot enough without wasting most of the heat to the outside. And I also need to investigate installing insulation into the machine. However there are convection slots which may be used to cool the body of the machine and putting insulation there will block the convection and therefore actually make things worse. We'll see. But that is very nice. So I am going to end the video here so that I can actually go and eat it. I hope you enjoyed this video. As always please let me know what you think in the comments and now I'm going to eat my soup.