SmokinPi – Development Starting Again

We were putting up with a significant drought, during which I was lazy and just left my SmokinPi outside.  Unfortunately, the drought ended while the Pi was outside.  Everything continued to work, so I didn’t think too much about it.

On my birthday, I had 6 racks of St. Louis style ribs to smoke.  The morning of, I went outside to set up the smoker.  Unfortunately, the Pi wouldn’t boot.  I frantically searched for a spare and found one in a closet.  I was able to get it running in time to get the ribs going and had a successful smoke with lots of friends and neighbors coming.

About two weeks ago, the uSD card decided to quit working.  I ordered a new uSD card and found that my GitHub repository was over a year out of date.  I lost a lot of tweaks to the firmware from the last year or two, but nothing major.  I pulled down the firmware and updated it to work with the latest PIGPIO library.  I also found that corrosion is starting to set it on some of the non-waterproof connections.  I expected this to happen though, I didn’t take care to use waterproof connectors or even gold plated connectors.  I actually expected this a long time ago.  I’ve removed the corrosion temporarily by scraping it with a knife, but I’m sure that is only a very temporary solution.

In any case, it is time that I start trying to get things up and running again.  I’m currently in hour 16 of a pork butt and everything is going fine.  I’ve captured a crude schematic of the analog hat I made two years ago.  It needs a themocouple circuit added to it to use as a flame detector and ESD protection as well.  Maybe I’ll get this stuff added to it before two more years go by.

Smoker Hat R0.01 – Basic support for driving a servo and measuring the temperature of 10 channels.

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