DIY Digital Meat Thermometer with Predictive Filter

Even though cooking is an elegant art form, the at-home chef often has a number of fancy gadgets. From counter top grills to USB coolers, high end electronics have made themselves available in most aspects of modern food preparation and enjoyment. In keeping with our DIY spirit, and with Father's Day and July 4th grilling right around the corner, we decided to build a DIY Digital Meat Thermometer using a temperature sensor, an LCD, and a microcontroller. To our delight, getting this project to work well required some interesting bits of engineering including advanced signal processing.

In this video tutorial, we outline the process for building the DIY Digital Meat Thermometer. In order to speed up the measured reading, we estimate what the transfer function of the system is and use a predictive filter to "guess" what the actual temperature is at the tip of our probe. The concepts, and the some of the intuition behind it, are presented in our video tutorial. The meat thermometer can be used with a computer to give a live temperature graph, or be used with just the LCD. Whether it's a fathers day gift, or just a fun weekend project, this little gadget is sure to draw some attention at the next family cookout.