Pictured: a meat smoker. And next to him, a contraption for cooking meat.

Before you write hate mail about my calling this guy a meat smoker, keep in mind that his name is Peter Rauch, and rauch is German for “smoke”.  Peter smoke.  Deal with it. (Wholly unnecessary disclaimer: He probably isn’t a meat smoker . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that.)  Anyway, Richard Peter here built an awesome, text-message sending meat smoker with a touch screen interface and built in temperature sensors.  He sets the desired temperature, and the smoker sends him a text message when the meat is ready.  The interface can also automatically hold the meat (heh heh) at a specific temperature for a long period of time.

It’s built out of a couple terra cotta pots, a 4-loop Gefran GFX4 temperature controller, a doohickey 5000, Modbus remote terminal (RTU) interface, words words words, a TS8010 HMI Touchscreen, and a bunch of other stuff I’m not going to list (the full parts list is in this pdf file).  I wonder what the text messages actually say.  If I built this, I know what I’d program it to send.  “Honey, this machine just called us meat smokers,” I would say to my imaginary husband.

[Make]