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 I ordered a new uSD card and found that my GitHub repository was over a year out of date.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.