The Cooker Connector - Blog #2.5: A Slight Change of Plans (Pi Chef Challenge)

Have you ever thought to yourself, “What a brilliant idea! I bet no one has ever thought of this before!”? That thought very rarely turns out to be true, and it just happened to me again. Oops.

Since writing my last post, I discovered that the company that makes my temperature probes released a new product that is basically a clone of what I'm building: https://www.thermoworks.com/Smoke-Gateway. I was shocked that I didn't find it when I was doing research before the contest, and I had been struggling with this dilemma for the past few days. I can't ethically reverse-engineer one of their products and then publish the steps to build a competing system. And, this clearly means that my contest entry is no longer a novel invention.

I emailed the Pi Chef Challenge organizers about this, and they were quick to respond. I proposed a modification to my design, and they said it was acceptable.

I am going to add a servo to open and close the air vents of my smoker. This will create a temperature feedback loop, enabling autonomous temperature control. This means that the smoker will be able to adjust its own temperature without the chef being involved! This is not a feature that the Smoke Gateway has, and I believe this will make my project more interesting and a novel concept again. (Fingers crossed!) It will still be connected to the cloud, the temperature graphs will still be displayed by the mobile app, and the vents will be controllable via the app as well. This obviously is an increase in scope, and in order to finish on time, I will be dropping the hands-free display portion of my original proposal as a trade-off.

Revised System Architecture:

Revised Project Plan:

The three components will need to be prototyped, designed and built in parallel. The first milestone is a Proof of Concept that demonstrates the end-to-end data path for real-time temperature information. Once I am confident that I can acquire temperatures and store them, I will build the servo system to control the air vents on the smoker. Once the prototype is functional, I will design and fabricate a PCB. Lastly, I will build the additional user features into the cloud back end and Mobile app. Below is a breakdown of the tasks for each component.

• Monitor and Control Hub
  • Hardware component research
  • Hardware prototyping
  • Thermistor calibration
  • Software development to enable proof-of-concept
  • Servo system prototyping and building
  • PCB design and fabrication
  • NFC research and development
  • Enclosure prototyping and assembly
• Cloud Back End
  • Database architecture development
  • Proof-of-concept development
  • Integration with Sensor Hub application
  • Integration with Android Client App
  • Cloud function and alerts development
• Mobile App
  • Proof-of-concept development
  • Feature development

I’m actually pretty excited about adding this capability to my project, and I’m looking forward to this as a new challenge. I’m more of a software engineer than a mechanical engineer, so I’m definitely going to learn a lot from this modification. Look forward to some trial and error posts from me in the near future!