StokerLog Version 5 Preview

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.

i don't have an atcs yet, but let me be the first to congratulate you.

I will be testing it on Saturday Amir.

Thanks man.

OK, I just ordered 3 more meat probes and 1 more temperature probe to help test out the updated program (I just needed an excuse and this is a great one!)

Got email working (thank you!), can you explain what the graph frequency, under mail settings, does and what enable email logging on the main page does?

Thanks guys.

Email frequency sets the number minutes the program waits between sending the email logs. So if you set it to 5 minutes, that is how often it will send it. Note that hotmail quickly classified these messages as spam and start putting them in my junk folder. So you may want to check on this.

Graph frequency tells the program how often to also enclose the graph. If the number is 0, then it never sends them. If you set it to 1, then it will send it together with every email. If you set it to 5, then it sends it once very five emails.

The graph size starts around 10Kbytes and grows to 70 to 80 kbytes when the graph is mostly full. So you may want to be careful in not setting too low of a frequency as it might fill up your inbox fast.

Note that on my test XP machine, the function to extract the graph would fail one out of two times. The program ignores these errors now so that it doesn't stop logging but you will also not get the graph enclosed. Would be interested to know if you are seeing this or not. So set the frequency to say, 2, and then see if every other message has the graph. if not, let me know.

Once you set the parameters for mail, then you must set the checkbox next to Start button to enable email logs. Otherwise, the program will simply store those settings, but will not send any email. I wanted to make sure people explicity enable this functionality, and it doesn't just send email without them knowing it, costing them money on their cell phone.

Amir,
Tried using the software, but every time I tried to connect to my stoker an exception was being thrown and stating converting " to Single is invalid. And a second graph window opens.

Here is a screen shot of it

So I am backing using the latest 4.2 version for now.

BTW I only have 1 blower on the system and only 1 Pit probe running.

UPDATE!
I figured out what was causing the crash. It was because I didn't have any food probes connected. Once I had the food probe going version 5 worked. I unplugged the food probe and restarted the Stokerlog and it crashed again.

Thanks Bob. Great find. Looks like I forgot to check simple boundary conditions like you ran into. Just did that and found three bugs! They were easy to fix but unfortunately, they are the core of the HTML decoder so I may be introducing new bugs. I will keep checking and then post with all the other fixes.

FYI, I added the capability for graph editing to second graph now. So everything that can be done on the first graph, can also be done on the second. The only thing not yet done is Lid Open as that only operates on first pit.

By the way, anyone has use for Ramp mode for both pits? It is fair bit of work and if it is not used often, it will save me some time .

Thanks a lot for your hard work Amir.

I plan on giving this a try on Saturday for an overnight butt & brisket.

My pleasure Patrick and thanks for trying it on a real cook.

I have updated the link to the latest version in progress. It has a number of bug fixes plus wiring up the graph edit/caption functions for the second graph. I also added fuel stats to the second graph although fuel stability is still not implemented, as is the case with Lid Open.

More bug fixes. So folks testing should get the latest version updated in the first post.

New is two Fire control pop ups which show the current temp, target and per request, blower bar graph. So at a glance, you can see how the cook is doing as far as control. I also updated the color coding of the temps. Gray means you are withing tight tolerance. Blue color means the temp is low, and orange/red means temp is too high. I also enlarged the window to show the decimal point (including on the primary UI).

Amir,

John from Rock's Barbecue gave me a prototype controller for a Traeger BBQ075 smoker to test out. This new controller replaces the built in Traeger controller and allows it to interface with the Stoker. I'll be doing a test run this Saturday.

Once I'm sure the prototype controller is working properly I'll test it with StokerLog and let you know the results.

Bill

That's great Bill. Would be interesting to look at the new fire statistics and compare them to other stokers, cooking at similar temps to see if the efficiency is.

Amir,

There is a UI issue. If you have a very high res screen, and then choose a large font size in windows for example 120dpi, then the control sections are messed up. Here is a printscreen.


Stokerprintscreen

I see it Andy. I have a 4 million pixel display and it is cool here. Have you by any chance changed the default sizes for various controls in Windows (i.e. in Display properties)? I suspect that is what is causing the problem. But the bug is in my app as I have hardwired the start position of row 2 on and if the first row is drawn differently, it will impact that.

I may need your help to test it as it works fine on all of my systems here.

Edit: I see that you mentioned changing font sizes . Didn't read that the first time. Please test the version below.

Andy, here is a test version for you to try: http://la.gg/upl/StokerLogPreview3a.msi

FYI, I only adjusted the vertical location, not horizontal. I have to run but I can fix the other dimension is easy to do. So just let me know if the vertical spacing is right and I will then apply it to horizontal.

Thanks,

Thanks Amir the vertical spacing looks good.

Screen

Hmmm. Looks like we have a decision to make. The first row has its font hardwired so it is not affected the same was as the other rows. If I make the fonts all the same, that would be cool by you? In other words, your global settings won't have an impact on stokerlog.

Problem I have is that if you change the fonts, it messes up the spacing of the columns.

Sure, go ahead and hardwire the fonts. I just had to up the font size on this screen because otherwise they are totally unreadable. The first row font size is plenty large.

Works for me, go ahead and hardcode the fonts