First Smoke

Last night my neighbor called and informed me that we'd have an impromptu BBQ today. He would smoke a brisket, and I'd smoke 3 slabs of baby-back ribs. So I stayed up till 11pm adding a PID algorithm to the control software in preparation for today's smoke.

Today's weather conditions were very challenging for smoking. It was sunny, but cold gusty winds off Lake Michigan cooled the temperature down to around 60 and played havoc with the smoker temperature. My neighbor was fighting with his all day, but the PID algorithm worked like a charm and kept the temperature within 10 degrees of 225. I did notice quite a bit of overshoot occurring, so I'll need to run a test and log the system's impulse response to fine tune the algorithm parameters.

It was great being able to wander around and go about my business while QPID did it's thing. And the ability to check on it from my phone was really nice; for now I only have the web page implemented, but I'll add the notification feature once Async Labs adds a client mode to the WiShield's TCP stack.



And as for the ribs? They were awesome! :-)