I agree, Meater probes are crazy expensive, but I wanted an option that didn’t involve wires so I didn’t find any other solutions. I never intended to make it work with HA, but the downside of these gadgets (at least the original meater) is range. Their website claims that they’re good for 30 feet. I have a kettle grill and most of the time when I’d put the lid on, signal would be lost (probes report to your phone via BLE thorugh an app). So that made me quite furious, I contacted them and they suggested me to buy an accessory to amplify the signal (around $50 pfff), so I went to google looking for a DIY option. I was surprised to find out there were some attempts at making it work and I tried a couple of them and found that hanging a Raspberry Pi Zero in a small box in direct line of sight of the grill would get me a perfect signal (I guess the Raspberry Pi Zero has a better antenna than my phone… or phones in general?).
So that ended up better than I anticipated .
And I obviously take no offence, I know I payed a lot, but I wanted my setup to be as wireless as possible.
BTW, yesterday’s test was a success, estimated time was incredibly stable and did not jump around as it did when I was running tests earlier by heating a pot with water (test setup was a little sketchy hehe) and the result was spot on.
Any ideas of what I could do with the other value I get which is the “ambient” temperature (ie. grill temperature)?
I’m not sure how big an effect the ambient temperature affects the end result. However, if we go back to the Heat diffusion equation (my first post), then conceptually the ambient temperature would affect how fast the meat heats-up. Of course this makes more sense if the grill is open and there is snow outside. However, if the cover is closed, then the outside temp effect is likely to be very small.
I use mine just as a smoker setpoint indication to know whether my 'low and slow" temperature is at the desired temp.
It probably wouldn’t be as useful when grilling when you are using direct high heat tho.
I have a bunch of automations set up around my smoker…
it announces the smoker temp over my Alexa devices every 15 minutes during the cook and it announces every time the smoker temp deviates from the setpoint by more than 10 degrees.
I also have an announcement at the 2 hour mark (and then every 30 minutes thereafter) to remind me to check the water pan level.
And then I have announcements to tell me the food is getting close to being done (within 20 degrees and then within 10 degrees of the “done” setpoint) and again when the food actually reaches the “done” setpoint.
I also plot both the food temp and smoker temp on a mini-graph card.
And now, thanks to your inspiration, I have a calculated time the food will be done! Thanks!
But I still haven’t had a chance to actually try mine out in the real world yet… Hopefully soon tho.
This is really getting fancy now … and you’re giving me nice ideas. I wonder, if one grills chicken/steak/shrimp at the same time … one can have Alexa dictate the time in/out and time to flip the meat as well.
As long as you have enough probes, I only have 2 so I’m probably more limited than you guys.
Here’s something I did which is not so much a calculation, but a handy addition:
I set up an input_select with an assortment of meats and their corresponding usda safe to consume temperatures. That way I can set up my cook selecting for instance “Beef” and when I select the option in the input_select combo box that sets my target temperature to the corresponding value. I can also fine tune this number with a slider, but I rarely do that since we like our meat medium-rare.
So that way you only have to look up the temperatures once and set them up for poultry, fish, beef, lamb, etc.
You get the idea, the action that sets the temperature looks like this:
- service: input_number.set_value
data:
entity_id: input_number.meater_target_temp
value: >
{% set cook = states('input_select.meater_cook') | lower %}
{% if 'pork' in cook %}
62
{% elif 'chicken' in cook %}
65
{% elif 'salmon' in cook %}
52
{% elif 'lamb' in cook %}
60
{% else %}
57
{% endif %}
yeah, me too. one for the smoker temp (“ambient” as you called it) and one food probe.
My smoker temp probe is permanently connected into my smoker and then plugs into the controller when in use. and depending on what I’m cooking I may or may not use the food probe which I can unplug from the controller when not in use, too.
Other than power (from a battery pack or 5v wall wart) it’s wireless from there and connects directly to my wifi so I don’t need to worry about the range limitations of bluetooth.
I like it. Besides, isn’t that the point of all of this in the first place?
The ironic thing is that it takes way more brain power upfront to figure out how to get it all setup in the first place. So, in a way, you get the best of both worlds - expending all of that brain power learning all of this and figuring out how to implement it to keep the intellect sharp and then sitting back and letting the machine do the rest resulting in doing what humans like to do best, nothing!
To me is more like the sense of accomplishment of extending some functionality or doing something myself that a product didn’t offer in the first place.
Ever since I discovered HA I’ve been perfecting my doing-elaborate-things-to-automate-mundane-tasks because let’s face it, you can only play so much with lights (I think it’s the first thing most of us do) before it gets boring, at least that’s what happened to me.
You could add Percent complete as a calculation also, so when you are asked how done is the steak, you can say about 60% done.
Accumulated Cook time / (Accumulated Cook time + Time Left)
Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I just got this working today making updates to things that have changed (like needing to change variable.xyz to sensor.xyz and requiring float(default=0)). Anyone have some fancy math for maintaining a somewhat accurate time estimate when the rate gets close to 0 or even negative during the 'stall"?
.
Thanks!
Hopefully soon tho.
