Beer, BBQ, Pi, and Time Series

With the weekend here, it is always amazing to see what people do with technology. For many of us, sitting around having a beer with some great BBQ is the picture of happiness. But what do you do if you are a geek and want to "pump up your BBQ experience"?

Funny you should ask!

Step 1: Get some great meat, good wood, etc. (oh yes there are books written about this!), but that isn't the point. The point is to have a reason to hook up your BBQ to some cool technology.

Step 2: Pimp out your BBQ fan to optimally cook the meat! Case in point — check out Brian Ketelsen's BBQ, which he live streamed and collected real-time metrics for.

Brian has shared all his code in a GitHub repository, just in case you want to try this at home, but basically, he hooked up a Raspberry Pi to a fan that blows just the right amount of air to create the optimal temperature for the food. This is all written in Go, uses Gobot.io, and all the data is stored in InfluxData's InfluxDB — our time series database.

Brian now has the ability to perform predictive analysis, via machine learning, to determine when his diners can enjoy the optimal tenderness of the meat — OK, he isn't doing that yet!

Good job Brian, and big thanks to Erik St. Martin @erikstmartin you have shown us how to bring some great technology to life!

For those of you wanting to hook up your own Raspberry Pi to other household appliances, like weather sensors, you might want to watch our webinar that shows you how to monitor your weather station with Raspberry Pi and InfluxDB.