Well, with the holiday season sweeping through and busyness at work, we missed the deadline to submit our smoker to the ArduinoFun guys. That is a bummer, but the contest did motivate us this far and we’re close enough to finishing that the momentum should carry us.
Over the holidays, Josh was able to finish the smoker control code and get the smoker fully assembled. He ran into a physical bug in that the temperature sensor never registered anything above 185 degrees even though the inside temperature of the trash can got up to 230. We think this is due to the placement of the sensor, which is just inside the can on one side. We’re going to try putting the sensor on a rod of some sort so that it sticks out into the center of the can. We’ll need to add a shield to prevent the sensor from getting dirtied with drippings from the meat, but that should be easy enough.
We’ll update the blog when we cook our first meal with the smoker.
And, as before the code for running the arduino and controlling it from the laptop are available in either of our git repositories.