Does anyone want to help reverse engineer the Meater BLE probes?


 

Nathan F

New member
Hi,

If anyone is interested, I have started a project here: https://github.com/nathanfaber/meaterble

I have some demo code and can reliably read the probe temperature and produced a reasonable fit. The ambient needs some work along with battery levels. The goal is to be able to read the probes directly from an RPI or an ESP32 and then use it for anything, I'd like to use it for MQTT.
 
Whoa cool! I looked at reverse engineering this myself when I first got my Meater but didn't get very far so it has just stayed stuck to the side of my refrigerator since the one day I tried. I've never even installed the app. When they said there would be an API for hooking into, I was hoping they'd publish how to connect and receive the data but I guess that was never their plan. It is like the ideal HeaterMeter probe because it can read meat temps and grill temps and is immune to A/C power supply noise. Would be great to get it into the Pi and then have the Pi publish the values to HeaterMeter for a (wired) probeless setup with just a Pi Zero W.
 
Whoa cool! I looked at reverse engineering this myself when I first got my Meater but didn't get very far so it has just stayed stuck to the side of my refrigerator since the one day I tried. I've never even installed the app. When they said there would be an API for hooking into, I was hoping they'd publish how to connect and receive the data but I guess that was never their plan. It is like the ideal HeaterMeter probe because it can read meat temps and grill temps and is immune to A/C power supply noise. Would be great to get it into the Pi and then have the Pi publish the values to HeaterMeter for a (wired) probeless setup with just a Pi Zero W.
Yea, it would definitely work well for HeaterMeter. I've got the probes streaming with reliable tip temperatures using 5 of my probes and a Pi, I also have the probe ID identified (for block users). The ambient is baffling me, it is almost as if they interpolate into tables based on the tip temperatures. I have fit a few lines but they don't seem to be reproducible for all tip/ambient combinations to produce a reliable ambient.

Do you want to unstuck that Meater from your fridge and see if you see anything interesting? :) I could use another set of eyes for ambient. I have two pieces of code that just run on a Pi, one that dumps and one that attempts to interpret and produces out CSV or Influx formats for known variable fields.
 
This probe looks awesome.

Nathan, I'm impressed you were able to fit the temps as closely as you did. But, I opted for the easy route and peeked into the app. I just attempted to PM you at github and sent you a spreadsheet link with several BLE command UUID's and the formulas for the tip and ambient calculations. Please try these against your data and let me know how and where you want to collaborate on it.

My Meater probe arrives tomorrow and now I just need to build my third HeaterMeater to get a Pi Zero based system with BLE .
 
Whoa cool! I looked at reverse engineering this myself when I first got my Meater but didn't get very far so it has just stayed stuck to the side of my refrigerator since the one day I tried. I've never even installed the app. When they said there would be an API for hooking into, I was hoping they'd publish how to connect and receive the data but I guess that was never their plan. It is like the ideal HeaterMeter probe because it can read meat temps and grill temps and is immune to A/C power supply noise. Would be great to get it into the Pi and then have the Pi publish the values to HeaterMeter for a (wired) probeless setup with just a Pi Zero W.
Hey Bryan,

Eric Thomas and I have been working on getting a basic version working. The github contains sample code that will run on a Pi Zero W and discover all the probes and dump continuous updates to stdout. How did you envision publishing to HeaterMeter? It doesn't look like the remote API currently supports sending probe data, unless I am missing something.

You can take a look at the sample output on the github to get a sense of what we have (https://github.com/nathanfaber/meaterble#running)
 
Oh very nice! No there's not currently a way for an external program to write probe values into HeaterMeter. I think ideally it should publish them up to the HeaterMeter device and then let them trickle back down into the Pi's systems.

Unfortunately right now I am on my 20th consecutive day of work without a day off as the project I am on is in full crunch mode so I am not sure when I'll be able to look at it. At least two weeks I'd say.
 
Hey all, just got a new smoker and looks I'll be building another heatermeter as my hast one I permanently mounted to the old smoker. Any ideas on moving to ESP32 or do you think heatermeter will stay on Raspi long term.
 
Hey RJ!
I think you might have posted to the wrong thread, but no there are no plans to move away from the Pi as a host as long as they still make the Pi 3 and Zeros. The ESP32 are very powerful but they still only have like 500KB of RAM and I think it would be a challenge to shoehorn the entire system into such a tight space.
 
Hey RJ!
I think you might have posted to the wrong thread, but no there are no plans to move away from the Pi as a host as long as they still make the Pi 3 and Zeros. The ESP32 are very powerful but they still only have like 500KB of RAM and I think it would be a challenge to shoehorn the entire system into such a tight space.
Hey Man! long time, huh? Sorry I posted here because of the reference to the ESP32. FYI, there are modules with up to 16M. I can create a new topic if you think it's worth discussing. Hope you are all safe and healthy.

 
FYI, there are modules with up to 16M.
16MB of flash, however looking at that module it does only have 520KB of RAM but does have 8MB of external SRAM as well. I didn't realize they supported external SRAM too. Still, it would be a from-scratch complete rewrite of the entire codebase from PID loop to daemon to database to web pages so that's not feasible. It does look a lot more attractive knowing that it is more capable than I expected, but I'd rather work on new features.

Hope you're staying safe and tucked away from germs as well!
 
16MB of flash, however looking at that module it does only have 520KB of RAM but does have 8MB of external SRAM as well. I didn't realize they supported external SRAM too. Still, it would be a from-scratch complete rewrite of the entire codebase from PID loop to daemon to database to web pages so that's not feasible. It does look a lot more attractive knowing that it is more capable than I expected, but I'd rather work on new features.

Hope you're staying safe and tucked away from germs as well!
10-4, that answers it, looks like it will be RasPI for the foreseeable future.

Take care.
 
I will say that since you alerted me to that, it really made me consider what it would take to convert at least all the Pi stuff over to an ESP32. I mean $6 vs like $40 (Pi3B+ and SD) is a pretty good bargain, and I'm hella-cheap. I'm also somewhat confused about my employment situation as my current work contract is in healthcare, which as of last Friday is on hold until hospitals aren't being crushed under their emergency patient load so I'm trying to figure out what to do for the next month or two. I keep thinking well maybe I have time to do a major rewrite? If I did it would probably be to the webui.

Anyway, always good to see some of the old school HeaterMeter people popping in!
 
I hope everyone is safe and healthy! Has there been progress or a plan for integrating Meater probes into HeaterMeter? I just got an e-mail from Fogo Charcoal offering a 15% discount on anything Meater with Code FOGO until 4/21.
 

 

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