Multiple Damper Selections


 

Gary V

TVWBB Fan
Now that I have lots of time to piddle with my heatermeter, I went back to my original damper I purchased when I got into the project and fixed the issues I had with it and now started to play with it again. I now have an Adapt a Damper and a Micro Damper to play with. Now that I have used them on my grill, I have noticed that each damper works about the same on my Primo Jr. Most of the time just opening the grill damper a little more with the MicroDamper, gives me usable control and fairly tight control. But to make the Micro Damper work even better requires a tune session with the PID parameters to match it to the grill. So here is my question Bryan. Would it be possible to add another setting to the GUI and to the Heatermeter to allow selection of a damper you would like to use and then load those PID parameters that you tuned and saved for that damper into the controller when you start your cook. Just like selecting your setpoint, my vision would be to select a damper and load that into the controller. My grill can cook indirectly, or use ceramic plates between coals and grill grates and other grill grate positions and load, amount of food, that sometimes requires tweaking of the pid settings. So I am thinking of an array of maybe 20 selections. Each could be named what you want like the pit probes and be able to display 2 rows on the Heatermeter display. In the gui you could name the point and maybe add type of cook. When you tune when that damper is selected its saves settings. when you power on your heatermeter one of your screens would be one that display damper. Press up or down key will display your list of dampers. Left key load that damper and it parameters into the controller.
just a thought. Hope I explained this well enough.
 
I won't add this because it creates more confusion on the config page, which is already daunting enough with its 50 different options all thrown in your face at once. Especially considering it's not a very common use case to swap grill equipment and want to associate probe names and such with different profiles.

What you can do is just make a URL that switches between your profiles. On the bottom of the configuration webui, there's a "full configuration URL" which contains all the parameters that make up a configuration. If you bookmark that URL, it is essentially a profile and all you need to do to switch would be to log in to the HeaterMeter (which establishes the auth cookie) then click one of your stored configuration URL bookmarks to set all the parameters. You can cut out things you don't want to change when switching profiles from the URL and just include what you want to change like:
Code:
http://heatermeter.local/luci/admin/lm/set?pn1=Control&pn2=Probe%201&pidd=7&pidi=0%2f05&pidp=5

I'll try to keep this in mind though when the pages all get redesigned at some point, some manner of setting multiple values at once as a stored bundle.
 
If it means anything, I would find it helpful as well. I use the HM on different cookers and with 2 different size dampers (rd3 and rd25) and I also found the setting that work for low and slow are not best for hot cooks.
 
I think this speaks to my long standing request to have the ability to save configurations and recall them, that would accomplish this goal along with several others (multiple wifi locations etc).
 
Except this wouldn't be covered by that because it isn't stored in a configuration file. Saving wifi profiles and AVR EEPROM parameters are two vastly different unrelated operations. I know it is all just config, but it is why backing up your computer doesn't include the BIOS settings.
 
Bryan, thanks for your reply on my post. I totally understand your thoughts on my request and will give your suggestion a try. Looks like the solution will work for me. The only reason for me to want to store multiple configurations would be if I changed a component of my PID control loop. Essentially the damper change is one of those times. Various cooks, I find, do not have me tweaking my control loop. Since I position my control probe in the exact point every time and perform my slow cooks exactly the same every time, my control loop can easily be controlled with the dome damper. This is the beauty of the Heatermeter.

Will follow up when I give this idea a shot.

Thanks Gary
 

 

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