How to hack the Ember Sous Vide controller into a Crockpot

The Lower East Kitchen has a great open source sous vide controller called the Ember. I was lucky enough to meet the LEK people at BioCurious where they did a class where we built the Ember controller and got to try some steak out of one they already built! I recommend both.

I'm not going to go over how to build the Ember kit, LEK has a great tutorial for it, (they also have a tutorial on doing exactly this but for a coffee pot). I'm going to take you though how to hack it into a crock pot. Really all we're doing here is mounting the controller, connecting 3 wires, and placing the thermometer. So even if you have a different crock pot, or something totally different, most everything here will still be of some use to you. I'm not going to go into why anything works in this; I'm aiming at a audience that has minimal electronics experience since there were a lot of people at the class that wanted a sous vide machine but had never soldered or done any electronics work before.

Step 1 Break it open

My crockpot was held together with a wide rivet like post and a locking washer. I tried going at it a few ways but in the end I just clipped the posts off. I would have liked to reused them but they weren't designed to every come apart. I got some screws and nuts with washes to replace them.

Once its open take a look at the wires; they're should be 3 that carry power and depending on the design another set connected to the thermometer. Of the power wires, one will connect from where ever the power cable comes in to the heating element, one will go from the power cable entrance to the existing controller, and the last one will go from the controller to the other end of the heating element. You can take out the thermometer and save it from another project because the ember kit already has one its calibrated to.

Remove any mounting screws and cut all of the cables attached to the existing controller. Don't cut the wire from the power cord to the heating element, only the ones on the controller. If your wires aren't colored differently you can label them.

Comments

[studdmstr]

Nice write up, but the just a suggestion.....instead of those cheesy and prone to failure crimp connections, a nice solder joint and heat shrink would be much better and more "factory" looking.

[abefetterman]

This is awesome!! We're so psyched to have this. This crock pot actually looks really complicated but you're simplified how to hack it. Thank you.