Newb here-need some help

Hello all, complete newb to the Heatermeter and just purchased and built the 4.2 kit and have a few questions. When I power it up, I get Pit 21 and fan speed 100% but I also have a solid red and green LED, is this normal because from previous post I have looked thru I was thinking only 1 led would be lit? Second last night while trying to get it to connect to my wifi, I could not find it. On the registration page it said no devices located. I did see on several occasions that the IP address 192.168.201.1 did display for 20 seconds or so but I still could not connect to it. Now after saying that, I am more of the electrician/electronics guy then the computer IP person. I have a small understanding but that is it. I have a buddy that is going to help me with it Saturday, he has the 4.2 also, but I want to make sure that my board is working correctly before he gets over. I did hook the raspberry B, that I ordered with the kit, to a monitor but all that stuff is jibberish to me. Thanks for the help and trying to get me up and running here.

PS I currently use a PID system on my 60 gallon reverse flow, but all it does is show me the pit temp and turn the fan off and on.

Something I just noticed, if I pull the SD card, I get the message that the card was removed and then when I reinsert the SD card it tells me that there is a problem reading the SD status register. is this because I am not near my home network? I noticed I do not get the IP address message today while messing with it on my break at work. Like I said I am not the smartest at the IP stuff.

The Pit temp being 21 sounds like you've got a thermocouple board but haven't gotten into the config yet to change it to thermocouple type so that's fine. The green LED means the fan is on and the red LED means 100% output, both of these are normal because it thinks it is 21F and wants it to be 225F. Yellow should not be lit because that means "lid open". Everything sounds good here.

Did you remove the SD card while it is running? That's a big no-no because that's what everything runs off of, it is like taking the hard drive out of your computer while it is on. I'd re-flash it with win32diskimager again to make sure you've got a clean filesystem before continuing. After you flash the image, put the SD card back into your computer and you'll see it show up as a drive. On that drive, there is config.txt. Open it with notepad or something and go to the bottom and remove the # from the lines in front of wifi_ssid and wifi_password and put your wifi network name and password there. Save the file, eject the SD card, put it in the pi and 2 minutes and you should see an IP different than 192.168.201.1 on the LCD, and you're done.

Bryan Mayland said:

The Pit temp being 21 sounds like you've got a thermocouple board but haven't gotten into the config yet to change it to thermocouple type so that's fine. The green LED means the fan is on and the red LED means 100% output, both of these are normal because it thinks it is 21F and wants it to be 225F. Yellow should not be lit because that means "lid open". Everything sounds good here.

Did you remove the SD card while it is running? That's a big no-no because that's what everything runs off of, it is like taking the hard drive out of your computer while it is on. I'd re-flash it with win32diskimager again to make sure you've got a clean filesystem before continuing. After you flash the image, put the SD card back into your computer and you'll see it show up as a drive. On that drive, there is config.txt. Open it with notepad or something and go to the bottom and remove the # from the lines in front of wifi_ssid and wifi_password and put your wifi network name and password there. Save the file, eject the SD card, put it in the pi and 2 minutes and you should see an IP different than 192.168.201.1 on the LCD, and you're done.

Click to expand...

Yes I did remove it with the power on, sorry. Okay i am now just getting back into it and I powered up before I read this post and the first thing I noticed was that a different IP address popped up. While I was at work, I went ahead and hit all of the solder points again with our kick butt Hako solder/desoldering station and this may have made a difference. I am going to go ahead and try to continue the setup process again and see what i get. thank for the info Bryan.

Ok I got it, I am guessing I had some cold solder or some solder joints that just did not have enough on them. Went right to the device registration page and it was there. Got into the setup and set probe 1 to thermocouple and also changed a few settings. Now my Heatermeater is showing No Pit Probe and all the LEDs are out. Thanks for the help Bryan.Going to pull my TC out of my smoker tomorrow night and do the boil test/calibration I read about and hopefully this weekend I can do a test run on it. I have to change my blower wiring out to be able to use a cat6 connector and then I should be good. This heatermeater is about 1/10 the size of my current PID setup.

Just a small update. Got everything working but the text messaging. I get emails and I am able to get push bullets but the texting me is stumping me. I look in the activity log and it shows the message going out to the correct address but still nothing shows up, Sprint is the service. My fiend set his up to my address and I got it so a little more troubleshooting and I sure we will get it figured out.

Must be something in the Sprint settings, switched it to gmail like my friend said and bam text messaging working.