This is a pizza oven controller which will use an ESP8266 along with a thermocouple and a MAX6675 to send temperature information to a MQTT broker. The long term goal will to add motor controls to also control the flame height to maintain the proper temperature.
Components
1×
NodeMcu ESP8266 ESP-12E WIFI Development Board
NodeMcu ESP8266 board flashed from Arduion IDE
haha! hopefully it wont be for a Darwin Award. But, I think that the simplest application is an alarm that will let me know when temperature goes too high/low. The next step would be to rig a motor against the flame control (though, that is something that I should monitor). There are beer brewing systems that do this very affectively though.
I tested the temperature monitoring on both my pizza oven and a solar oven that I have and the device did great! I think one of the best things is with the solar oven. I can set an alarm when the temperature starts to go down letting me know that the focal point of the sun has moved and I have to reposition the solar oven. that is very handy so I don't have to continually watch the oven and its position to the sun.
Flammable gas, ESP8266 and pizza ...Hmmm, methinks you've done some research on the target group for the HAD prize. :-)