I have been working on automated temperature control of my Weber kettle grill. First try was a device that had a fan and a valve that would send air along a feed tube (at least 2 feet long). I was not happy with the results. Based on other systems I have seen the air input is much closer to the grill (not delayed by a tube). So I figured I would give that a try.
My current version is damper control only (no fan) mounted on the top vent. A single board computer (Odroid C2) controls the damper with a PID controller written in perl. I ported the PID controller from the Arduino PID library.
I am still working through PID values but first test (charcoal only) was pretty good.
Two big areas to tweak are the PID values and the minimum level at which the damper opens. I found that with small values of damper being open there really isn't much air flow.
I tried the damper only approach (vs damper and fan) because I was able to manually control the Weber with top vent only. I figured I would try to reproduce that with automation.
My current version is damper control only (no fan) mounted on the top vent. A single board computer (Odroid C2) controls the damper with a PID controller written in perl. I ported the PID controller from the Arduino PID library.
I am still working through PID values but first test (charcoal only) was pretty good.
Two big areas to tweak are the PID values and the minimum level at which the damper opens. I found that with small values of damper being open there really isn't much air flow.
I tried the damper only approach (vs damper and fan) because I was able to manually control the Weber with top vent only. I figured I would try to reproduce that with automation.