Automation of a Mattson Bean Cooker: A simple and a low-cost approach

This work aimed to automate the most popular method to determine the cooking time of grains: the Mattson Bean Cooker apparatus. The proposed system is a low-cost and a simple approach, offering the possibility of calibration according to the size of the analyzed grains. The automation is based on the use of magnets, Hall effect sensors, potentiometers, and an operational amplifier to monitor the plungers' positions. The time required for each grain to be cooked is shown in a LCD display, and the connection among all the components is made by an ATmega328 microcontroller from the Arduino UNO R3 board. The proposed system can be assembled in an already existent device, costing similar to US$200. Its validation was made with two different grains: carioca beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and lentils (Lens culinaris). Despite the differences between sizes, both grains were suitably analyzed with the developed system. Practical applications Cooking quality is an important property of beans, and evaluation of cooking kinetics is important for beans subjected to agronomic/genetic improvement and to processing using different techniques. In fact, the Mattson Bean Cooker can be used to determine the cooking kinetics of different grains. However, its use requires a constant observer, making the task tedious. Therefore, the present work reports an easy and low-cost approach to automate the Mattson Bean Cooker device, automatically obtaining the cooking time of grains, which can be used for industrial or academic applications.