I like my home automation tech but it needs to serve a purpose. Just being connected to wifi is not a selling point for me. Lights that turn on in the morning when I need to wake up are great. A thermostat that can reduce energy usage when nobody is home is also great. But a grill….what the fuck does Internet access do to improve the grilling experience?
And if it requires the cloud to work, I don’t consider it a functional product.
Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.
Serious answer?
I have an app on my phone that allows me to control my pellet grill as long as it and my phone have an internet connection.
Doing a 12 hr smoke, I can leave the house and monitor it while I go shopping, change the temps if its not acting right. I can set temperature alerts and then go around the house and my phone goes off when the meat hits a certain internal temp. Its really really handy.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
I have a Traeger and saved $200 because it was the model without WiFi.
I made a delicious turkey breast on Independence Day
Are you live from your backyard where you’re smoking meats?
🎵. meat like a brisket. 🎶
Nah, I’ve got a Bluetooth thermometer so I can track it while I play video games
Jokes on you when they invent a new kind of meat your grill can’t cook
It can do bread and the best tasting broccoli and Brussels sprouts you’ve ever had
Are you seriously taking the risk of brussels sprouts with outdated firmware?
DRM Ribs. The Salmonella will not die until you pay for Traeger’s $19 a month subscription
Someone’s gonna crack that shit and release it as a spice and when you open it a cool as fuck midi techno track plays while you crack your ribs.
The Salmonella will not die until
Oops, RnD team accidentally created indestructible Salmonella bacteria which consumes flesh. Management was pushing RnD to create a better bacteria because hobbyist grill people were killing the bacteria and bypassing the DRM on the grill, but it escaped the lab. It has infected nearly all animals other than sea fish because of proximity. Survivors build floating cities on the sea and thus we have Waterworld!
Skill issue. I eat my food raw. The explosive shits are just me speedrunning my bathroom breaks. Efficiency baby!
Wow, that’s super-topical in more ways than I had expected. The more I read, the more scarily insightful it gets.
spoiler
- The main character being a refugee, with almost all that entails (can’t blame Doctorow for not anticipating it getting this bad)
- The dystopian collusion between the appliance-rentiers and the landlord, as well as the climax hinging on lack of tenant protections
- The way capitalism attempts to subsume all critique.
This is a story that’s important, that everybody needs to read.
I’m an immigrant (not a refugee to be clear) and this excerpt absolutely nails the camaraderie aspect of it and the way that living in immigrant neighborhoods/buildings feels. Turns out, Doctorow’s father was born in a refugee camp.
Please eat verification Sausage.
Please chew with your mouth open.
raw shrimp on a grill staying completely uncooked next to grilled chicken and steak because you don’t have the DRM for SeaPak©️ shrimp (photorealistic, art station, comedy, vivid)
It’s a smoker with wireless controls
Instead of having to keep checking on it for several hours, an app on your phone will show the temperature and allow temperature adjustments online
Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.
Keep it Low & Slow!
ok but why aren’t you outside with a beer…pretty sure that’s a part of the meat smokers law
I mean that’s what I do when it’s something small, but when it’s something that takes 10+ hours, that’s a lot of beer and standing.
Though right now I just have an alarm to check it every half hour. Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I had the same thought and went with a HeaterMeter, although I haven’t finished building it yet.
I have a non digital charcoal kettle, and I found good options for blowers and temp control in China.
It’s a simple fitting that I only use doing very long cooks. Saves all the mucking around with the official stuff
Not for a brisket though. I’m too old to stay up that long.
Because I live in Texas and being outside in the summer for extended periods is dangerous.
Seems like we shouldn’t encourage people to live in locations where being outside for 6 months of the year is hazardous
The problem is that this keeps changing
That’s pretty much everywhere
Not everyone can live in California wine country.
Most people live where it gets either dangerously hot or dangerously cold for large portions of the year.
Some people also think the point of fishing is to catch fish and not to chill out by the bay with some light beers.
It can be both, but at least if i don’t catch any fish I’ll catch a good buzz
!ping
Fish in the area!ping
Fish on hook
Tap REEL to begin reeling!ping
Fish escaped
Tap CAST to try again
Funny enough that’s what I’m doing now, then my cousin leans over with his phone to show me his brisket is sitting right at 225
BS. They update that expensive crap because it’s full of security holes.
OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.
It’s because of the reliance on hundreds of thousands of third party web dependencies that are constantly updating and constantly getting security patches (and introducing vulnerabilities)
For that and fear the company getting bored and pulling the plug on servers, leaving me with a paperweight, is why I didn’t get much into the IoT stuff.
One time I bought some under armor shoes with bluetooth. They would connect to my phone and an app would take measurements on my stride and angle of my foot in my runs. At some point they decided to make the app a subscription. They wanted a whole $15/mo! I decided to just run like a caveman instead.
I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.
On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump’s admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. “And where do you think they get their data?”
One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app
Damn these smart capitalists figured out how to get a weather satellite into space for that cheap? No wonder socialism failed/s
For real tho it reminds me of that joke about libertarians being like cats. Also $15/mo feels way to high for weather updates
You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no
Just waiting for the day an evil hacker leaks someone’s smoker data to the neighborhood, exposing they cranked the smoker to 375° when they bragged about their brisket cooking 225° the whole time.
That sounds like the plot to an American Dad episode.
You make some good points.
I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
My parents old farmer house had a smoke cabinet (wood chips heating). You put meat in, let it smoke and take smoked meat out, done. Though it makes a mess.
My point is, what do you need to monitor that for?
Depending on the internal temperature curve I may need to change cook temps in the pit, which I can do remotely. I also monitor the curve to determine when to spray and wrap, and other activities, depending on what is smoking.
Expensive options: thermoworks smoke-x
1-200 depending on 2 or 4 channel version, legally can only be used in the us and Canada because they use a custom rf protocol. As a result the range is 1.24 miles. Thermoworks is pricey shit but it lasts long, can be calibrated, and generally is one of the most accurate cooking thermometers you can buy
(albeit much much much more expensive than a $10-30 k type thermocouple and a used reader for $50 that is way more precise and usually will do data logging) also granted for most people a $20-40 thermometer would be fine with like 300-500ft range
My issue with “smart” anything is not the inherent concept, it’s the execution 99% of the time. I have plenty of smart stuff in my house but it’s almost never convergence devices. I’ve learned that these types of devices are more than anything designed to be disposable trash. Designed as cheap as possible, cut as many corners, introduce as many security holes as possible, etc. we have 0 consumer rights so even if it’s strong they’ll change the tos after the fact when their profits fall and they need to make the line go up.
So it comes to this. I’m not opposed to “smart” devices. They just have to occur in a dumb, roundabout way. They have to work without being connected to the internet, or in some rare cases by being bridged to the internet via home assistant from an isolated vlan. If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades. If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents? If I would then check open source and if nothing exists make it. It sucks but this where our garbage profit driven society led us, to shitty products that fill landfills and waste resources
Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.
If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades.
When I’m not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I’ll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don’t know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit’s traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.
Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.
I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.
I’m not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I’ve opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.
If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents?
Yes. I’m primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I’ve cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.
Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I’ve done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.
The perfect brisket heist.
Idk I just simply wouldn’t buy the wifi grill
Imagine a grill without the latest firewall
Thank you so much for that!😂
semi related
Hacking My Smart Grill - Intercepting SSL to AWS Services via Firmware Modification ~> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tH6VU6chEc
the hazards of living in the burbclaves
quick, hit the manual override before it’s too late 🖲️
I don’t understand how we’ve become so dumb that we simply can’t turn a knob for gas and strike a match for a flame. Or, well atleast dumb enough to accept these kinds of shitty products on the “free market.” I understand having convenience in your life, but at the cost of this? AND a higher price all for some “super smoke” and “timer” option.
Is this the technofeudalist dream? If the next big thing in smart tech is to add ai to grills to “get the perfect sear” or whatever, just kill me.
PLEASE tell me you sent this message via smoke signals.
Why does a grill need a screen and buttons? Maybe I’m living in the stone age, but what I call grilling involves putting charcoal to a flame.
When you want to intergrate your smoker into homeassitant so you can adjust it from the office.
It’s a smoker add on. I’d assume so you can adjust the temperature without actually opening it.
It’s a smoker, with a port for a temp probe in the meat.
When you smoke something for 10-12 hours it’s nice to get temp readings from wherever. It might also have automatic control for temperature management.
Why that needs to be connected to the internet is an entirely different matter though.
So you can get updates while you are at work.
That’s a pretty basic program with simple software needs.
If the programming is such shit there is a chance they need connectivity to update it or patch the code once it’s gone into production, it might be best to look into another product.
I wonder how long it takes for the firmware update to take place. A few minutes? An hour?
I recognize the community I’m in rn. Just curious about how long it actually takes. I doubt it takes very long, or happens very often.
In a similar vein was the location of the charging port on the Apple mouse. Sure it seems asinine, but you only charge it like once a month, so it really isn’t an actual issue. It was just an excuse to hate on Apple products.
In regards to your apple mouse example, surely it’s relevant to know how long the charging process is. The hangups I would have are when the interruption happens, how quickly is it resolved, similar to your points about the firmware on the grill.
If it takes 30 seconds to recharge to a point of usability, fine, no real harm. But if it takes 10-20 minutes to get to a usable state, then we have an issue.
A related scenario is if the Nintendo switch drains completely of battery; even plugging it into a dock and trying to play docked, you still have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to give it enough juice to boot back up.
A quick search suggests that a 2 minute charge will provide a few hours of use, while it takes about 2 hours to charge it fully. Whether that is acceptable or not is up to the user, of course. But to me that seems pretty reasonable. Though none of this really matters for me, as I don’t use mice.
Having used these mice, you can get through the day with like a 2-minute charge, then leave it overnight to cover the next few months.
They could have made it possible for the user to choose when to update, for example after using it. Apple could have just stuck the port in front and let people charge while using the mouse. Both have no downsides
I’m not disagreeing, just pointing out that it is likely not as big of an issue as people make it.
poor baby. who grills out on thanksgiving? also my charcoal grill never does this
It’s very possible, dare I say preferred, to have a traditional Thanksgiving spread getting made in the kitchen while someone grills up some veggies.
“Le Firmware? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
Sounds like the start of Cory Doctorow’s book Radicalized.
