Hello you all.
At long last, here is a sneak preview of Version 5.0. I have some more work to do here but thought I sign up some free testers
. To whet your appetite, here is what is new:
* Support for dual pits/dual blowers. A second window/graph is popped when the second blower is detected (and assigned to a probe). The second graph will show this pit sensor, its fan/blower status/graph, and any probe whose name as an asterisk in it (“*”). Note that none of the captions work yet and only show up on the primary graph. Alarms are shared between the two pits (i.e. there is only one fire alarm music file).
* Up to 16 probes although in this preview, only 7 shows up right. I lack hardware to test more right now.
* Email notifications. And not just any email notification. The program can optionally email you the full graph as an attachment in jpeg!
* Ability to run unlimited copies simultaneously. OK, there is a catch
. I found an easy way to add this ability and that was by enabling the old HTTP mode. It took fair bit of work to resurrect it but it is there now. There is a checkbox under the IP address called “HTTP Only.” If you set this, the program will only use the web interface and as such, it cannot interfere with the main session using Telnet. This makes the program slow to run but you still have full capabilities and of course, it can run from anywhere in the world where you can get an HTTP request in. So run the first copy without this checkbox, and then later copies with the box checked as less performant but functional ones.
* Temp panel now has “stay on top” flag set so that it is always on top of all windows. Over time, I will make this a bit more elegant. Note that this only supports pit-1 in this preview.
* Alarms are all local to the program. If you update the stoker, say, as a result of some other change, it will tell the stoker to turn off all the alarms regardless of whether you have them set in the program or not.
* UI has been re-organized/cleaned up, hopefully for the better
. For the fire, I show the short term and long term temp stability but have also added a new field which tells you what percentage of the time the blower is on. This should give you an idea of how much fuel you are using. Note that this is wired to work correctly for the old/as-shipped firmware. I only a bit more work to do to wire it up for the latest/user-downloaded version of the firmware.
* I got rid of the non-sense alarm where you could set a “food” alarm for the fire. And vice versa for the food probes. Hope no one misses them
. Made the UI better.
* HTTP Alternate port. Just add a colon ":" after the IP address and then put in the port. For example: 192.168.1.88:230
Here is a snapshot of the program with a bunch of probes:
Now for the geeks out there. I had totally re-write the user interface logic to build the interface on the fly. In the process, I re-architected half the program and unfortunately, touched every piece of code, including hard to debug pieces I was hoping to never touch again. So sadly, there may be bugs in many places. As such, I do not recommend that you use this for mission-critical cooking until there is more experience with it. I suggest using the simulation mode or connecting to an idle stoker and playing with it to make sure it is stable on your machine and the way you use it. I have not yet cooked anything with it myself but have run it overnight and it survived that.
Also, this page serves as documentation. The included doc is for 4.2 version. Most features are self explanatory. For email, see the new menu item under settings. I have only tested it with gmail. Be sure to use the test button in that dial to test your settings. If you can’t get it to work, use a gmail account first and once you have that working, try other accounts. I have tested gmail with my Verizon phone and SMS messages work there.
Look forward to feedback in this thread.
Here is the download link for official 5.0 version. It is bug-free at this point and replaces earlier versions : http://amir-views.com/downloads/Stokerlog5Test2.msi
It was a lot of work to get here. But it was fun too
. Hope you enjoy the new functionality.
Edit: Updated the link to latest preview version.
Edit 2: Yet another update. Now the old and new firmware work just as well with the fuel usage stat. And a few other bugs are fixed.
At long last, here is a sneak preview of Version 5.0. I have some more work to do here but thought I sign up some free testers
* Support for dual pits/dual blowers. A second window/graph is popped when the second blower is detected (and assigned to a probe). The second graph will show this pit sensor, its fan/blower status/graph, and any probe whose name as an asterisk in it (“*”). Note that none of the captions work yet and only show up on the primary graph. Alarms are shared between the two pits (i.e. there is only one fire alarm music file).
* Up to 16 probes although in this preview, only 7 shows up right. I lack hardware to test more right now.
* Email notifications. And not just any email notification. The program can optionally email you the full graph as an attachment in jpeg!
* Ability to run unlimited copies simultaneously. OK, there is a catch
* Temp panel now has “stay on top” flag set so that it is always on top of all windows. Over time, I will make this a bit more elegant. Note that this only supports pit-1 in this preview.
* Alarms are all local to the program. If you update the stoker, say, as a result of some other change, it will tell the stoker to turn off all the alarms regardless of whether you have them set in the program or not.
* UI has been re-organized/cleaned up, hopefully for the better
* I got rid of the non-sense alarm where you could set a “food” alarm for the fire. And vice versa for the food probes. Hope no one misses them
* HTTP Alternate port. Just add a colon ":" after the IP address and then put in the port. For example: 192.168.1.88:230
Here is a snapshot of the program with a bunch of probes:
Now for the geeks out there. I had totally re-write the user interface logic to build the interface on the fly. In the process, I re-architected half the program and unfortunately, touched every piece of code, including hard to debug pieces I was hoping to never touch again. So sadly, there may be bugs in many places. As such, I do not recommend that you use this for mission-critical cooking until there is more experience with it. I suggest using the simulation mode or connecting to an idle stoker and playing with it to make sure it is stable on your machine and the way you use it. I have not yet cooked anything with it myself but have run it overnight and it survived that.
Also, this page serves as documentation. The included doc is for 4.2 version. Most features are self explanatory. For email, see the new menu item under settings. I have only tested it with gmail. Be sure to use the test button in that dial to test your settings. If you can’t get it to work, use a gmail account first and once you have that working, try other accounts. I have tested gmail with my Verizon phone and SMS messages work there.
Look forward to feedback in this thread.
Here is the download link for official 5.0 version. It is bug-free at this point and replaces earlier versions : http://amir-views.com/downloads/Stokerlog5Test2.msi
It was a lot of work to get here. But it was fun too
Edit: Updated the link to latest preview version.
Edit 2: Yet another update. Now the old and new firmware work just as well with the fuel usage stat. And a few other bugs are fixed.