Cooking pasta is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen, second only to watching a pot of water boil. But as pasta maker Barilla points out on its website, you can cut your meal’s CO₂ emissions by up to 80% if you simply let the pasta sit in hot water rather than actively boiling it all the time. time – a technique known as passive cooking.
The trick is in getting the timing right, so in a rather surprising move, Barilla has released an open-source device design that will help you master this power-saving technique. Admittedly, it’s not a very complex piece of hardware, consisting of little more than an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, an NTC probe, and a handful of passive components wrapped in a 3D printed case. But the documentation is great, and we have Barilla to thank for stepping out of their comfort zone with this one.
Magnets in the 3D-printed case let it stick to your pan lid, and when it senses the water is boiling, the gadget alerts your phone (at least for this version of the device, an Android or iOS app is required) that it is time to add the pasta. A few minutes later it will tell you when you can turn off the burner, after which all you have to do is wait for the notification that your passively cooked pasta is ready to be removed.
Like the accessory making video that Sony released after the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, we recognize that on some level this is an advertisement for Barilla pasta. But if developing useful open-source gadgets that the public can build is what a company wants to spend its ad dollars on, you won’t find us complaining. Hell, we might even jump for a box of Barilla the next time we’re in the store.
Thanks to [fgma] for the tip.