A few days ago, ArduinoFun posted information about a contest they are running over the next couple months.
What perfect motivation to kick our first real project into high gear. Or maybe just into gear.
Our project is an electronically controlled smoker. The basic idea comes from Alton Brown, whose method is described in this instructable. We are augmenting this project with an Arduino so that, at the very least, we can control the temperature.
To that end, after collecting many parts, we started down the road of implementation. I assembled the XBee Adapter Kit that will be used to control the smoker from a laptop, and Josh got the AD595 functioning.
Pictures
The completed XBee adapter next to a new kit.
The AD595 Thermocouple, breadboarded up for testing.
The AD595 reading the temperature of the room.
Here are some of our suppliers and the subcomponents we’ll be using:
- XBees and XBee adaptors, for setting the temperature and data gathering (from a nearby computer): Adafruit. (We also got our Arduinos from the always awesome ladyada.)
- The relay used to control the hot plate itself will be based on this design from SparkFun.
- The AD595 thermocouple amplifier and the Thermocouple also came from SparkFun.
- Even through we want to smoke a lot more than turkeys, we were certainly inspired by the TurkeyTracker folks. (Who you can now follow on twitter at @turkeytracker!)
- For actually deciding when to trigger the hot plate off and on, we’ll be using the Arduino PID Library. More detail on that as we get closer to showtime.