Shortly after Warman I ordered my first Arduino board.
Although I'd love to get every gadget and new toy that comes out and experiment with them, it seems that without discipline, any hobby can turn into a bottomless money-pit rather quick.
While doing tutorials is a very effective form of learning, I've found that, at least in my case, solid motivation is necessary to continue learning and experimenting past the time when the novelty fades (anyone who ever became proficient at playing any musical instrument would certainly agree).
That motivation came, in my case, from almost burning my apartment down in early 2014.
No matter how safety conscious a person is, without proper safeguards and procedures, anyone can forget stuff and regret it forever. Some people fatally forget their infants in their car on hot days, and fellow paraglider pilots have fatally forgotten to re-buckle their harnesses after doing something else. In the latter case, a safety mechanism was developed eventually, but regarding the former, I haven't seen bluetooth or NFC enabled child seats yet (someone has probably invented something already but I'm not aware of it, wouldn't be the the first time..or the thousandth).
My case was less dramatic, although few times in my life I felt such terror. I was a block away on my way back home when I got my wife's call. "You burned the apartment" I heard in disbelief. Later she realized It was just smoke, although enough to trigger an evacuation of the building and the presence of two fire trucks. All for forgetting to turn off the beans on the stove.
After much post-traumatic thinking, I learned the following:
-Renters (like me) won't really invest in better appliances when they are part of someone else's property.
-Landlords won't really invest in newer appliances, even if they have superior safety features, if the existing ones are working as they are supposed to.
-As literature shows, a vast majority of house fires originate in the kitchen, often from unattended cooking.
-There is a market of kitchen safety devices, aimed primarily at elderly people or sufferers of Alzheimer's. They are quite expensive and tricky to install.
This lead me to wonder why the ubiquitous lemon timer never evolved to something that could turn the knobs of gas stoves off. Aware of all the safety and regulatory aspects of fiddling with safety critical equipment such as gas appliances, I decided to come up with something with the Arduino that could turn the knobs of the the gas stove off after a certain time. Knob Jockey didn't sound acceptable, so I started calling the project "Stove DJ".
The (very crude) solution was a 3D printed case for an Arduino/LCD shield combo, and a sailwinch servo mounted on a protruding arm. Sail-winch servos are among the few hobby servos that can both rotate continuously and track position at the same time (nicer servos such as Dynamixels or Herkulex don't really fit the bootstrapping philosophy, and at the time I didn't know about the OpenServo Project).
The housing was designed using FreeCAD, Overhanging features were deliberately avoided,
in order to facilitate 3D printing
Telling people about it, someone suggested adding intermediate programs, such as "cooking at full flame for 15 minutes and then simmer for 30 more". With such a flexible platform like Arduino, those things are easily incorporated. Even gas sensors for added safety were a possibility. However, I learned shortly after that the oven's timer could still be used while off, and I started using it to time the cooking on the stove. This, along with the safety concerns of fiddling with gas appliances, lead to abandoning the project, not without some serious learning experience, the true fundamental point of the whole thing.
Recently I saw a similar concept, the Meld, As the StoveDJ, the Meld, although much further developed, is a retrofit for existing kitchens, and brings programmable functionality that facilitates cooking many different recipes. As the excellent documentary "Everything is a Remix" illustrates, invention sprouts simultaneously in multiple instances, when the conditions are right, just like seeds waiting for the right weather.
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