Chef iQ BLE for Home Assistant

A native Home Assistant integration for the Chef iQ CQ60 Smart Wireless Meat Thermometer (and any other probe that broadcasts on manufacturer ID 0x05CD / 1485).

• No cloud. No Chef iQ account, no MQTT bridge, no BLE Monitor required.
• Local push via the Home Assistant Bluetooth integration. Works with any source HA already knows about — local USB HCI, ESPHome BT proxy, SLZB‑06 (LAN), Shelly BLE Gateway, etc.
• Sentinel‑aware. When a probe ring isn't in contact with anything (only the tip is inserted, ambient is exposed, etc.) the firmware emits a "not‑measured" value of 0x7FFB. This integration masks those to unavailable instead of letting 3,276 °C end up on your graphs.
• Battery is properly scaled. Raw 0–255 byte → 0–100 %.
• Per‑probe config entries. Each physical probe gets its own device card with all six rings, battery and signal as separate entities — auto‑discovered the moment HA sees a Chef iQ advert.
• Multi‑probe ready. Built for the 4‑probe Chef iQ set out of the box — wake each probe in turn, accept its discovery card, and you'll have one independent device + entity bundle per physical probe. See Multiple probes below.

Quick links

• 🍳 Full smart‑kitchen dashboard (with screenshots): Docs/DASHBOARD.md
• 🤖 All 27 automations + scripts: Docs/AUTOMATIONS.md
• 📊 Single‑probe dashboard: examples/dashboard.yaml
• 📊 Four‑probe dashboard: examples/dashboard_multi_probe.yaml
• 🛠️ Install: HACS — recommended · Manual
• 🍗 Multi‑probe setup guide: Multiple probes
• 🗺️ Where it's heading: ROADMAP.md
• 🐛 Issues / feature requests: GitHub issues

Sensors per probe

Entity	Description
Meat temperature	The deepest ring (the "meat" reading)
Probe tip	Tip of the probe
Probe ring 1 / 2 / 3	Other rings up the shaft
Ambient temperature	Handle‑end ring (use this for grill/oven temp)
Battery	0–100 %
Signal strength	RSSI of the nearest BT source (disabled by default)

Any ring that isn't in contact with anything reports as unavailable rather than a bogus number.

Install (HACS — recommended)

1. In HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories, add:
   • Repository: https://github.com/ITSpecialist111/ChefIQ_Probe_HomeAssistant_Integration
   • Type: Integration
2. Install Chef iQ BLE.
3. Restart Home Assistant.
4. Wake the probe (touch the capacitive button on the charger). HA's Bluetooth integration will surface a "Discovered" card — click Configure → Submit.

Install (manual)

Copy custom_components/chefiq_ble/ into your HA config/custom_components/ directory and restart HA.

Why not just use BLE Monitor?

BLE Monitor is brilliant, but historically its bundled Chef iQ parser:

• surfaced probe rings that aren't in contact as ~3,276 °C (now fixed upstream — see the note below),
• doesn't scale battery from raw byte to percentage,
• and on Home Assistant OS only supports the local HCI adapter — it can't ingest from an SLZB‑06 or any other remote scanner that HA's first‑party Bluetooth integration knows about.

This integration is an end run around all three of those — it sits directly on homeassistant.components.bluetooth, so any source that integration sees, this one sees too.

(The sentinel fix has since been merged into BLE Monitor via PR #1538, so recent BLE Monitor versions no longer show the ~3,276 °C readings — handy if you prefer to stay on BLE Monitor.)

Multiple probes

The integration is per‑probe by design — each physical CQ60 you pair becomes its own config entry, its own HA device, and its own bundle of meat / probe_tip / probe_1 / probe_2 / probe_3 / ambient / battery / signal entities. There's no hard‑coded limit; the 4‑probe Chef iQ set works out of the box, and so does any number beyond that as long as your Bluetooth source(s) can hear all of them.

To pair multiple probes:

1. Wake probe 1 (touch the dock button), accept its discovery card.
2. Wake probe 2, accept its discovery card. Repeat for 3, 4, …
3. Rename each device straight away under Settings → Devices & Services → Chef iQ BLE → <device> → pencil icon to something meaningful (Brisket, Chicken, Pork, Ambient, …). Entity IDs follow the device name, so renaming gives you readable IDs like sensor.brisket_meat_temperature instead of the default sensor.chef_iq_cq60_2_meat_temperature.

Each probe broadcasts independently, so signal loss / battery / firmware sentinel handling is fully isolated — one probe going unavailable never affects the others.

Dashboards

Two ready‑to‑paste Lovelace dashboards live in examples/. Both are pure YAML — open Settings → Dashboards → + Add Dashboard → Edit → ⋮ → Raw Configuration Editor and paste the contents of whichever file matches your setup.

File	When to use it
examples/dashboard.yaml	One probe. Gauge + entity list + 1‑hour history graph. The simplest possible starting point.
examples/dashboard_multi_probe.yaml	Two or more probes (built around the Chef iQ 4‑probe set). Sections layout with one card group per probe (gauge + ambient + battery + tip), a combined 2‑hour history-graph across all probes, and a commented Jinja snippet for a "hottest probe" template sensor.

Both examples assume the default auto‑generated entity IDs (sensor.chef_iq_cq60_*, sensor.chef_iq_cq60_2_*, …). If you've renamed your devices to something more descriptive (highly recommended — see Multiple probes), do a find/replace on the entity prefix once and you're done.

Full “smart kitchen” dashboard

The richer dashboard from the project screenshots — doneness gauge, per‑ring thermal map, live trend, a Food Safety column (pasteurization, lethality, danger‑zone, hot‑hold, rapid‑cooling), a Cooking Intelligence column (Newton’s‑law ETA, carryover, juiciness, cook phase), plus mode‑aware Fridge / cold‑chain, Fermenting / proofing and Chocolate tempering views, an optional AI cook assistant and Sonos announcements — is fully documented here:

📖 Docs/DASHBOARD.md · 🤖 Docs/AUTOMATIONS.md

Everything it needs ships in examples/: the dashboard (dashboard_full.yaml), the derived template sensors (cooking_physics_package.yaml), the 27 automations (chefiq_automations.yaml), the scripts (chefiq_scripts.yaml) and the AI / Sonos add‑ons.

Cooking overview	Food safety & cooking intelligence
Fridge / cold‑chain mode	Fermenting / proofing mode

Compatibility

• Home Assistant 2024.4 or newer.
• Tested with Chef iQ CQ60 firmware as shipped in late 2024 / 2025. Other Chef iQ probes that share the manufacturer ID may partially work — please open an issue with a packet capture if you have one.

Credits

Manufacturer‑data layout reverse‑engineered from on‑device captures and cross‑referenced with the parser in custom-components/ble_monitor.

License

MIT.