Barbduino update

Am still nowhere near connecting up to my grill, but have achieved the following, as individual tasks.

  • Having the arduino control a relay.
  • Connect up multiple temperature probes (borrowed from my Maverick electronic thermometer) to the arduino, and have it calculate the temperature.
  • Bi-directional communications between my netbook and the arduino. i.e. I can talk to the arduino from my netbook, and it can talk back, over the USB connection. This will allow me to log the pit and food temps on my netbook, and turn the “temperature to maintain” up and down. Ultimately, this will be done over WiFi, using a web browser, but for now I am doing serial comms using a Micky Moose perl script.
  • Fake remote control by installing VNC on my netbook. This will allow the netbook to be connected to the arduino, connected to the grill, downstairs, but have remote control of the netbook (and therefore the arduino) from my desktop upstairs. Or, indeed, from my Android phone.

Having got that far, it is just a case of pulling it all in together, and the the arduino can be set loose on controlling my pellet grill. However, that is when the real fun begins, with writing the control programme.

I’m going to be otherwise busy for the next couple of weeks, but I also need to order some components. Both the relay and the resistors are cheap components that came with my arduino kit. In particular, the resistors I have are +/- 5%, which is sufficient for testing, but not for proper use.

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