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Homebuilt meat smoker texts your phone when the meat is ready! - Gadget Freak Case #170: Smoking Permitted, but Bring a Roast...

Peter Rauch used a proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller that modulates electrical power to a heating element to create a home-built electronic meat smoker. A touch-screen display let him manage the controller set point and control-loop parameters. A J-type thermocouple in the top of the smoker provides a voltage signal so the feedback loop can control the smoker's temperature. A second sensor, which reads meat temperature, is used only for monitoring and alarms. A user can enter a desired meat temperature, and receive an alert via a text message when the temperature reaches a preset value. Additionally, when the temperature reaches this setpoint, the controller can 'hold' the meat at a preset temperature to avoid overcooking it until you can remove it.

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Instructables user kstruve writes:

I currently live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, which gets mighty hot in the summer. This summer, we've had several days around or above 110 degrees. I have twin baby boys, and despite cracking the windows, using reflective seat covers and running the A/C full blast when driving them around, their backs are just soaked with sweat when we reach our destination. The seats bake in the car in the sun for hours, then you put a baby in it and they never really cool off. So I devised this method for cooling their car seats with pump-recirculated cold water. The end product is a cooling pad to fit underneath the car seat cover behind their backs. This can be easily modified to fit adults too.

More:

• Bake Cookies in the Hot Car
• Liquid-cooled engines for R/C models

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So, what do you think? Have you had a chance to spend some time on Make: Projects yet? We'd love to get some feedback. What do you like about our new projects area? What would you like to see added or changed? Have you tried any of the projects? How did that go? Have you edited/added to any of the content? We're in beta, so we're still open to ideas of where to take this. Here are a few of our favorite projects for this week:

User-Contributed Projects

Homemade Bacon
Mmmmm.... Bacon. Josh Burroughs show you how to make bacon from scratch.

Cosmic Night Light
The always resourceful Kris DeGraeve makes a glittering LED constellation night light, embedded in resin, without the need for soldering.

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Throw a stone at any large gathering of makers, and you're likely to hit somebody who owns a set of DIY-savant Dave Gingery's classic books on building your own machine shop by casting scrap aluminum, melted in a charcoal-powered bucket furnace, into sand molds formed by wooden patterns. I've owned a set myself, for more than a decade, and "at least starting on the lathe," which is the first tool in the series, has been on my someday list since the first time I ever saw the books advertised in Lindsay Technical Books' classic ad in Popular Science.

Ask a thousand people who admit to owning the books, however, if they've actually made that start, and you'd be lucky to get one emphatic yes. Lionel Oliver II, on the other hand, whose amateur sandcrabbing website Backyard Metal Casting is probably the single greatest online resource for those interested in small home foundry work, has not only made a meaningful start, but gotten most of the way through the build. And, perhaps most importantly, he's documented the process quite well.

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Mr. Oliver's page has done a lot to inspire others around the web to take up the Gingery lathe project for themselves, but due credit has to go to folks like southern California resident Barry Workman, whose lathe, pictured above, was apparently complete as early as 1998. Barry also built the Gingery metal shaper from book 3 of the series.

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