The Greek Yogurt Temperature Apparatus (Remote Temperature Monitor)

So, my wife decided to try more and more ambitious recipes and now she's making Greek yogurt.  The trick with yogurt is that you have to keep it at about 120 F for about 16 hours such that the live bacteria cultures can grow.  This turned out to be a fun little arduino project (although next time I'll try Raspberry Pi).

We kept the yogurt at this temperature at first in a crock pot and then in the oven all night.  The trick for the oven is that if you heat up the oven to 200 F and then put your crockpot pot in it (wrapped in a towel?) and then leave it in their all night with the oven light on, it will remain about the right temperature.  So I decided to make a little system to communicate the oven temperature to us, so we could monitor it all night long from the warmth of our bed.

Basically it consisted of:

• Dallas Temperature Sensor
• Arduino Mega
• My PC
• A mobile device

The temperature sensor sent the temperature to the Arduino Mega (over 1 wire serial).  The Mega would send this serially to the computer.  A python script on my computer read it and updated a webpage with the temperature.  Then we used our Nexus 7 to read the temperature.

Unfortunately I didn't start this project until my wife was already well into making the yogurt.  She was asleep once I finally got everything debugged, so I didn't have the pleasure of impressing her.  But she was surprised in the morning when she got up to check on it, and I shouted the temperature from bed.  I'll be more prepared next time.