My ThermoWorks Signals thermometer’s battery was dead, so I connected it to my Anker 737 Power Bank (24,000mAh for the curious) to get me by.

Previously, I mounted a Wyze camera on a tripod and pointed it toward my thermometer because its Bluetooth connection wasn’t strong enough. WiFi worked fine for the camera, but our smoker is in our backyard and has to go through two external walls to reach any of our devices.

This worked well during the early pandemic when I was working from home. I could check the camera from my upstairs office or couch without worrying about the weather. As a bonus, I could see the front panel of my Pitbos Smoker to monitor it in case it ran out of wood pellets or the heat source went out. I could have bought the fancy ThermoWorks Signals thermometer, but a $20 Wyze Camera worked better.

Today, I have the fancy thermometer, and I still should have connected the Wyze cam because the smoker ran out of pellets, which delayed dinner by 45 minutes.

Maybe I will use this as an excuse to explore one of Ollama’s Vision libraries like LLaVA to read photos from the Wyze Camera and the smoker to let me know when something goes wrong.