Tag: barbduino

July 11, 2011
Saturday was the usual monthly gathering of local boardgamers, and I was cooking BBQ for a dozen people, not including myself. I was going to put chicken, burger and bangers all on slow smoke for a couple of hours, so we could break when we wanted. I turned the grill on, and 20 minutes later went back to put the meat on.

Cold. After trying the obvious, I took the cover off the business end, and we could see that although power was getting to the fan, the auger wasn’t going round. The only thing I could think of was that in the recent awful weather, my pellets had got damp, and seized the auger. The only question was had it just seized, or had I burned out the motor too.

July 7, 2011
I haven’t done that much on my Barbduino BBQ Controller project for about a month. No good reason, other than simply doing other stuff.

After hesitating over how the device is going to connect to the outside world, I decided to abandon the idea of a WiFi shield, and bought a standard Ethernet Shield instead. The reasons for this were various.

June 11, 2011
June 8, 2011
As I said earlier, I planned to hook my little-used netbook up to the Arduino.

One reason for this was that I felt I hadn’t progressed as far with playing with the kit as I had plannned; spending the day in front of a desk and computer for work, I hardly want to do the same in the evenings! Having the netbook working meant I could experiment with it on the sofa downstairs, while watching TV.

June 4, 2011
Earlier, I posted about my plans to build a digital controller for my Traeger pellet grill using the Arduino open source microcontroller board.

I’m new to the Arduino (although not to programming), so my first step was to buy a simple Arduino experimenter’s kit and do some general non-BBQ projects, to familiarise myself with the kit and its capabilities. This is still ongoing. I made a point only to buy the Arduino kit, and not the add-ons I might later require, such as the WiFi and LCD Screen options – doing so means I will learn to walk before I run, and limits my spend, in case the project doesn’t fly.