Meat Curing Room

All about the meat

I was born in Italy. One thing we just could not find in the US was high quality Italian cured meats. So, we started to make them ourselves. After 10 years we have made every mistake you could imagine. But we also make some of the best US made salami I've had. For this project we built a meat curing room made up of two cells. One small walk in refrigerator room and one larger long term meat curing room. I used multiple ESP8266s to create sensor units in each room. These update a Firebase Db on the current status of the room every 30 seconds. I then have a controller connected to a few relays that reads from Firebase and kicks on humidifiers or in wall AC units placed in the rooms.

The Trick Is

The trick for getting temperatures as low as 36 degrees F is to trick the AC unit sensor to thinking the ambient temperature is much higher than it actually is. I do this by wrapper it's sensor probe in a little heating pad run by a 5v source. This way the AC units will continue to run as long as they are powered on. I replace the AC unit's internal temperature sensor with one of my own so I can make sure I don't let the unit get too cold. It will freeze itself into a solid block if you let it go too long.

Real time control

A quick PWA allows you to control the room from your phone. So now I can monitor and change the settings to our curing room even when I'm back visiting family in Italy.

‍

‍

Tech Stack

All Recent Work