Project: Automatic Cheese Maker

Posts under this project (3)

---

---

---

---

The Automatic Cheese Maker (ACM) is a project I designed and created to help reduce the effort of making cheese. The ACM helps in this endeavor by automating some of the cooking processes involved in creating cheeses such as Edam, Cheddar and Halloumi. Some of the functions that it does automate include:
– Precisely heating the milk
– Continually stirring the milk
– Releasing ingredients such as rennet and cultures

The ACM consists of many different parts and required skills in circuit board design, electronics, metalworking, 3D printing and software engineering to create.

At the heart of the system is a Raspberry Pi running a heavily modified OctoPrint instance (called OctoCheese). This OctoCheese instance handles the overall cheese making process via a recipe encoded in GCode. The OctoCheese instance also connects up to Home Assistant to allow me to see the current progress and notify me when manual intervention is required in a recipe step.

Connected to the Pi is an Arduino running Marlin firmware. This Arduino has a custom shield circuit board attached which allows it to control the heating element, ingredient dispenser servos and stirrer stepper and monitor the temperature probes. The recipe GCode is transformed by OctoCheese into something Marlin will understand. This transformed GCode is then fed to the Arduino causing it to control the heating element, ingredient dispenser servos, stirrer stepper and temperature probes as required for the particular cheese.

As a result, a simple recipe can be written in GCode which is then translated to the instructions needed to make the cheese.

You can find out more about the project by seeing viewing the AutomaticCheeseMaker project on GitHub – https://github.com/AutomaticCheeseMaker/OctoCheese.