Cooking is all about temperature control: too cold isn’t good enough, and too hot can ruin everything. To aid in this regard, [Printerforge] created a smart temperature alarm to keep them aware of exactly what’s going on in the pot.
The device is simple — it uses an Arduino Nano hooked up to a thermistor to measure the temperature of fluid in a pot. The microcontroller displays the current temperature and the target temperature on a simple 16×2 character LCD. Upon the fluid reaching the target temperature, the alarm is sounded, indicating that the cooking has reached a given stage or must otherwise be seen to. The whole build is wrapped up in a simple 3D printed case, along with a lithium-ion cell with charging managed via a TP4056 module.
If you’re regularly letting your pasta overcook or your stews burn in the pot, this kind of tool could be useful for you. Similarly, if you’ve ever wanted to pursue the 64-degree egg, this could be a way to do it. The trick is to make sure you build it safely—ensuring that any parts that come into contact with the food are rated as food safe for your given application.
If this build has you contemplating the possibilities of machine-assisted cooking, you might like to go even further. How about getting involved in the world of sous vide? Meanwhile, if you’ve got any kitchen hacks of your own, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!
Commercial thermometers now can be inserted in the food (say, the center of a roast or a chicken) and be left there as it cooks AND send their readings in RT wirelessly. That if you don’t like to take your roast out of the oven and poke it with the cheap traditional bimetallic affair you can buy anywhere. Kudos for the DIY probe but i doubt it even has enthusiast cred.
never heard about thermomethers that you could left into the oven! Do you have any models/brand?
Not used a standalone one, but Any decent air fryer has me built in, and turns itself off to let the meat rest once it hits target temperature.
Meater Plus handles up to 275 degrees C, enough to leave it in the oven.
Thermoworks make excellent products for measuring temperature. I’ve not used the kind of thing that was mentioned but they do have them. I have a couple of their Thermapens for on the fly readouts as well as a few of their Dots and Square Dots for candymaking and the like.
If you’re looking for the absolute best one, a company called combustion inc makes a very fancy one. It has a series of thermistors in the length of the probe and uses some pretty advanced algorithms to figure out the actual temp and predict the cooking time.
Sure, Brian Langerstrom at Youtube showcases them every third recipe he cooks. Have a gander at this one https://youtu.be/eVuXwv1yxo0?t=288
Lots of Bluetooth thermometers with multiple probes/channels. E.g. InkBird
It looks like this still requires the human in the loop though. I thought that problem had been solved long before devices got ‘smart’.
What I really want is an infrared thermometer pointing down at each burner location, with a real-time readout. Bonus points if I can set a setpoint and get closed loop control.
I have not figured out how to avoid fouling the IR sensor though, short of blowing a continuous stream of clean air over the window, a la laser cutter nozzles.
FWIW, I do sometimes use a handheld IR thermometer for measuring cook surface temperatures. It’s just a bit clumsy, and a few drops of water splashed on the surface is just as effective at judging temperature.
I actually built something like this about 18 years back. I modified the panel of an Electrolux stove with induction heating and installed the IR sensors to point at the cookware and adjust the current to maintain specific temps. I made a few tweaks, but I never got around to my grandiose idea of building a submersible thermometer with rf connections to a monitor that would execute a calibration algorithm so I could approximately determine the temperature of cooking different substances by measuring the temperature of the cookware. I had no plans to insert the thermometer in my actual food, but I thought it might work for data gathering. (NOTE: I had expensive 5-ply quality cookware of the type that is manufactured by Heritage Steel. I’m not sure other cookware would be as controllable.)
Well, geez, that’s worthy of a write-up and submission to HaD!
A few years back I got sick, ended up homeless, and basically lost everything I had except about a thousand books which I managed to squirrel away. It has taken me 10 years to replace much of what I had before, but I no longer have workshop space nor the resources to (yet) to start fabricating stuff at my old level. Maybe I will revisit this in the future. Today it’s mostly software and design through simulators instead of physical artifacts.
That was my thoughts too, because I could go to my local Boyes (would previously been Wilkos!) and buy a similar thing for a fiver, but I have in fact built something similar. To automate the homebrewing process. There are a number of temperatures and times needing to be controlled, and this is a great platform to use.
Kudos! I’d been wanting to build one of these device for years, so I could tend to other pursuits while waiting for water to boil. While researching best-in-class, infrared thermometers (too expensive), I stumbled upon the more affordable, Thermoworks “ChefAlarm” . It combines a rugged sensor and cable (guessing to make it oven-safe), a display (of course), high and low temperature set points, and an hour/minute timer. My favorite aspect of the timer is that it tells you how long the alarm has been beeping. Say you are cooking pasta and you go to a part of the house where you can’t hear the alarm. The timer will count down from, say, 11 minutes down to zero, then (while it’s beeping) it will start counting up to, so you when you walk back into the kitchen, you know how much you overcooked your pasta by. Gee, why is this the first timer I’ve ever seen that does this? Of course a real, multi-tasking chef (of which I’m not) would set the timer early so they can finish another patron’s dish, then look to see how long the timer ran over, and compensate in the final minutes.
I’ll just leave this here…
https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/fantast-meat-thermometer-timer-digital-black-20103016/
What would really be great, having a FLIR camera mounted way up away from cooking fumes connected to some OpenCV code designed to distinguish which burner station was in use and the size of the pot or pan. Use that information to average the temperature of the contents of the pot or pan and avoid false temperature reading from IR energy directly from the burner.
Just get a personal chef and don’t worry about cooking ever again! /s
Well, that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?
I’ve made roughly 100,000 meals in my lifetime, and I’m still having fun creating them. No complaints from my test subjects so far, and most of them are still alive :-).
How to cook pasta.
Step 0: Ignore everything you have previously read (big pot, salt, oil, stirring, boiling – all rubbish)
Step 1: Get your smallest saucepan (2-3x pasta volume), add water, heat until boiling
Step 2: Turn off heat, throw in pasta, put lid on
Step 3: After a few minutes stir pasta (to avoid sticking), put lid back on
Step 4: Drain after recommended (or preferred) cooking time