hanks for the reply. Yes since I am new to this and don't want to fry myself I would only tinker with the buttons that control the unit and not the actual coils etc. I'd assume I would only have to try to make a closed circuit and a switch of some sort to control the on off button or the up and down button (which would control the output wattage of the unit).
Hello,
I design induction heaters professionally and have examined a number of tabletop induction ranges to see what I could learn. The most important thing for you to know is that all of these ranges (they're almost identical inside) are line operated. That means that there is line voltage on all the buttons. There are only a couple of ways that you could do what you want to do safely.
One would be to use reed relays, one per button. The Arduino should be able to drive a small relay directly.
The second method which MIGHT work is opto-isolators. I say "might" because both the buttons and LEDs are multiplexed at a fairly low rate. You'll also need to read the LED statuses to know what mode the range is in. Because they are also strobed, this could be interesting. I'd probably employ an analog low-pass filter on each LED to smooth out the strobing and present that to the Arduino instead of trying to deal with the strobing in software.
The display will be your biggest problem. You might could avoid trying to decode the display with something clever such as pulsing the "down" button say, 20 times to ensure it is at the lowest setting and then pulse up from there.
Hope this helps,
John DeArmond
jgd@fluxeon.com