Organize the best barbecues ever with home automation

Everyone loves a good barbecue. Bringing your family and friends together on a long summer day and evening, cooking delicious food and having a good time as the smoke wafts through the air; it's the perfect weekend activity.

Barbecues can also be stressful. Anyone who's ever tried to host one knows the challenges of managing multiple meats at once, trying to avoid any overcooking (or undercooking) disasters, and keeping track of all that gear. p>

Automation can help you run your barbecue much more smoothly, minimizing incidents and ensuring everyone has the best possible experience. In this article, we'll see how home automation can enhance the barbecue experience and share some examples from Arduino's Project Hub.

How home automation improves barbecues Keep track of different items. Automation makes it easy to manage multiple meats and other foods at once, alerting you when something's ready so you don't get overwhelmed with tasks or neglect any part of your cooking. Stay on top of the temperature by measuring each piece of food and making sure it's at the perfect point. Create a more inviting outdoor space with features like automated lighting, heaters, and even a smart garden. Easy cleaning with robots and other tools to leave your grill and other tools sparkling clean. Some examples of Arduino projects

Arduino community member Duncan Barbee knew that the tastiest way to grill is to use charcoal to heat your smokers. Although propane and electric smokers give you better temperature control, they lose that unique and delicious charcoal flavor.

But charcoal heaters present many challenges. You need to constantly stay on top of the temperature, adjusting the vents regularly to make sure everything is fine as the level of coal changes in the smoker.

Barbee wanted to build a project that gave him the best of both worlds: the savory flavor of charcoal with the ease and convenience of an electric or propane smoker. He developed a controller that monitors the temperature in the smoker and automatically adjusts the airflow to the charcoal to maintain the right temperature at all times, allowing him to sit back and relax while the perfect charcoal barbecue.

Robert Korn had previously created a vacuum controller using Arduino and a handful of other components, with great success. He chose to apply the same model to a smokehouse and designed the Smokerduino, which guarantees perfectly cooked meat every time with minimal effort from the chef.

Roger Thériault and his wife like to make cheese and yogurt at home, but it's a long process involving a thermometer and a lot of waiting. To skip some steps, he built his own smart thermometer to monitor food temperature and beep when a specific temperature was reached and it was time to move on to the next step.

However, when the device stopped working, Thériault decided to upgrade it instead of just fixing it. The new iteration of the thermometer also uses Alexa devices, allowing it to easily monitor and control anything cooking in the kitchen or outside in the smoker.

The way it works is quite simple - just give an instruction to Alexa and it will find the recipe and ask the given device to start from the first step of that recipe. It also relies on recipe data to monitor temperature and make any necessary notifications or adjustments.

Better barbecues with Arduino

Monitoring and controlling cooking is one of the most useful and rewarding use cases of home automation. Arduino products allow you to assemble detailed and advanced projects to take your barbecues to the next level.

Check out the project hub for more inspiration or visit the home page to learn more about how Arduino works.