Back when I was a kid, I remember taking an electronics class at a local community college as part of their “college for kids” program.  We were taught about voltage and ohms and resistors and whatnot.  Most of this I don’t remember, but I vaguely recall building a simple flashing LED light involving a battery, capacitors and resistors.

To satiate my need for learning and building things, I hit up Adafruit this morning and picked up an Arduino starter kit, a MintyBoost kit, some necessary tools (soldering iron, multimeter, etc), a few other components for future projects and an electronics book.  The tools were the most expensive part, but that’s a one-time purchase.  Should be fun!

At a high level, my ultimate goal is this:

1. Read internal smoker and meat temperature when doing some BBQ smoking.
2. Monitor temps on my Android device.

Seems simple enough, but there’s a few other steps involved:

1. Build Arduino device with a thermocouple
2. Write Arduino code to sample temperature data
3. Transmit temperature data, probably via a connected laptop at first, wirelessly later.
4. Publish temperature data to a Internet-accessible location.  I forsee some PHP/JSON/MySql here.
5. Write an Android app to consume temperature data (timer, alarms for high/low temperature, notifications, etc).

I know how to do items 4 & 5 above.  The rest will be a learning experience that I’m looking forward to.

Is this overkill for BBQ?  Sure, and you can even build a PID controller with some fans for smoking,  but this gives me the chance to learn some some electronics.