Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Meat

We’ve only just begun to see the proliferation of smart kitchen gadgets. Dumb crock pots with the intelligence of a bimetallic strip, are being replaced by smart sous vide controllers. The next obvious step is barbecue. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [armin] is building a smart, eight-channel BBQ controller for real barbecue, with smoke and fans, vents and metal boxes.

This BBQ controller has been in the works for years now, starting with a thread in a German barbeque forum. The original build featured an original Raspberry Pi, and could relay temperatures from inside a slab of meat to anywhere with range of a WiFi network.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [armin] is working on a vastly improved version. The new version supports eight temperature probes, temperature logging and plotting, a webcam, setting alarms, a web interface, 433MHz radio, and PWM and fan control. Yes, if you’re very, very clever you can use this project to build a barbeque that will cycle a fan, and open and close a damper while monitoring the temperature of a brisket and email you when it’s done. It’s the Internet of Meat, and it’s the most glorious thing we’ve seen yet.

15 thoughts on “Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Meat

    1. Ben Brown is already very, very clever because he can use his HeateMeter to build a barbeque that will cycle a fan, and open and close a damper while monitoring the temperature of a brisket and email him when it’s done! :) For a moment I thought this article was going to be about us!

  1. “Dumb crock pots with the intelligence of a bimetallic strip, are being replaced by smart sous vide controllers.”

    Not here, electronic control of cooking appliances has been a 30 year failure IMO. Gave up even trying them out a few years ago. They have a failure rate easily 5 times higher than basic thermostat or bimetallic strip, or mechanical timer controlled ones. Some of the failure modes are freaking scary, burn your house down scary. The only exception to this rule is microwave ovens. I am guessing that they have to be “more” FCC certified, so have higher quality components in or something. Also for some reason, when they had mechanical timers on, they were very failure prone, whereas what appears to be same mechanism on toaster ovens, very rare problems after decade plus service. Anyway, if slow cooker came out with “same control board and components as used in our microwave ovens.” I may give it a look. Otherwise I’ll stick to replacing things on a 5-10 year cycle, not yearly.

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