Has anyone bought a meater +

So when I saw this the first thing I thought was...would it work in meat that was vac sealed in a sous vide bath? Man would be interesting to be able to maintain tabs on internal temps in the sous vide! Have you tried it?

There is zero reason it wouldn't work. Just avoid a metal pot for the best Bluetooth signal.

A little confuse though. Isn't sous vide all about getting the meat to the perfect internal temperature? Isn't that the purpose of those very expensive hot water circulators with their temperature controls?

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Just tried it, it works

Yes, but you know exactly how soon you could take the meat out

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This exactly! Man...now I might have to order one...

I thought the Anova and similar did that via their app? What's "Precision" about my having to use a second device to monitor it? I could just buy a really cheap circulator then right? :thinking:

However a bit confused by the very expensive. My Anova was $80 (cheaper than the meat thermometer this thread is about). Agreed a heating element and a water circulator....all the Sous Vide does is keep the water at a set temp. Never understood why there were super expensive sous vides out there....

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absolutely...and a heating element and a temp probe to turn it on/off to maintain whatever temp you want.

The sous vide just keeps the water at the temp you want your meat at. So, you want medium rare steak, you set it for 130F. However...you don't know when the internal temp of the meat gets to 130. So you play it safe...the beauty of a sous vide also is 45min-1.5 hours still going to get a medium rare steak.

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Hmm, you're right. I lost interest in them and hadn't looked in a long time. I see there's now one for $99 CAD. Last time I looked, the cheapest was $250 CAD.

In regard to the price of the meat thermometer, yes it's expensive, but very versatile. Mine was a gift too. :grinning:

Inkbird user hear, also a wonderful machine. I never thought to use my meater in the vacuum...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C7PW3PC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I got that one for $69 about 6 months ago...but seems higher now. Absolutely worth it though! The 1 negative to sous vide is the time. If you have the cooking time they are amazing. You do want a good carbon steel or cast iron skillet to sear though after cooking.

You should not take out the steak out right when it hits the water temperature, it's supposed to stay at that temperature to make sure the germs are killed. Bacteria is not killed instantly at the point that the meat hits your target temperature.

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Thx

I spent some time with the UDP packets tonight. I think I have enough figured out to get temperature from them but unfortunately as it stands we can't do an integration locally and directly to the block as of right now.

HE gives us the ability to send a UDP packet and receive a response from that message. We are not able to just subscribe to broadcasts though. So, even though I think I can see what the packets are doing after spending a night with them in WireShark we'll either need a middleman to talk for us (like a ESP or RPi with something to listen to UDP broadcasts and then sends to HE) or I'll need to reverse the cloud API instead (which should be pretty easy since I already can see communication from the app to the cloud via a MITM).

I sort of figured this was going to be the case but I wanted to try the UDP route anyway... mostly for practice. I wrote the GMG driver off UDP but (happily and sadly) somebody had figured most of that protocol out already. Nobody has this one as far as I can tell yet.

Anyway... here's some findings if anybody else wants to join in the fun:

I couldn't really tell if there was anything interesting in headers of the packet but in the data segment the probes are listed in order with the following headers (not sure what to call them really) or byte markers. They are probably tokenizing the message and switching on the markers. Anyway... To get temperature there is always an 0x08, 0x10, and 0x18 value (in fact there are 0x20 and 0x28 markers as well... always incrementing 0x08. not sure what the significance is of that yet but those other markers are probably holding other probe information) that have to do with the temperatures. I can watch packets and these values change as temperature changes. The values are 16 bits (between the markers) and they appear to be least significant byte first.

I can convert these to base 10 but they are not meaningful yet, probably because they are thermistor analog voltage readings or something along those lines. I already know what to do with these though if that's what they are (because I have built a DIY BBQ thermometer with thermistors and a ESP8266) or I will be able to figure out some type of maths to make them work into temperatures. They already seem to scale fairly linearly.

It was easy to isolate the temperature values by placing 3 probes too far away to connect and then moving the fourth in and out of ice water and my hand. I could also see the cook data (between more byte markers) with the cook names and target temperature. Things that are changeable from the app are pretty easy to isolate. It would be a bit tedious but I think we could figure out what most of it is by just sitting in the app, changing one value at a time and doing a diff between packets.

Anyway... this is fun but it will probably be far easier just to reverse the cloud API given that I can't use the UDP packets anyway in HE.

In other news, I also sent Meater support a rather poignant email. I asked them if they wanted to contribute to the UDP work I was doing by providing additional information or if they want to sit back while we figure it out anyway. I will probably do my very best to portray them as negatively as possible if they don't help. I've talked to so many other companies at this point that have been reasonable that they would be an outlier not to help.

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I have good news. Support is kindly relaying messages between myself and somebody who can save me some time I think. There is a websocket available to get updates from the Apption Labs cloud. I may have found it when I reverse engineered the app's conversation with the cloud but I still haven't done that yet.

Either way, those folks over there seem like they are going to play ball and be very helpful! That is nice. I love it when that happens. Yay!

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Thank you for all your work

Any update on this? Any hope for an integration? Would be interested to hear what you've worked through with support.

The BLE protocol has been reverse engineered as mentioned on post#6.

BLE is one option to get connection and bring the data to the hub. I have been working on BLE gateway for hubitat. I do not have meater to test. I cannot be sure how visible doing this with meater.

If you are interested on experimenting with creating a DTH for it, I may be able to help you getting meater data to hubitat with my BLE gateway. One complicated part of bluetooth is paring. There is an app that we can try to verify this. A bit digging with the app and meater can help to do some due diligent whether the BLE is a path that is worth taking.

Thanks
Iman

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I got $10 in buying him ones, if we can get 5 more people

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In my thread for my BT module project, I mention a couple tools to see whether it is do able to integrate a bluetooth device.

You can use nrfconnect to get idea a lot about the device that you would like to integrate. In meater, using nrfconnect , you can find out if you can connect to it and maintain connection. You can try to subscribe or read these service/characteristic

"a75cc7fc-c956-488f-ac2a-2dbc08b63a04"
"7edda774-045e-4bbf-909b-45d1991a2876"

If we can get subscribe to it and get data and maintaining the connection from nrfconnect, we should be able to integrate meater just fine.

If you have meater work with hubitat through the module that I am working on, I may be able to get you one of my module to get this working.

Thanks
Iman

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