Building a servo controlled damper valve


 
Bryan Mayland said:
Well, ya know, maybe some day. You could always put the config in a startup script and then just swap SD cards or something :-D It's sort of a neat idea but I'd rather work on other apsects.
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Well, since I put the HM into a case swapping SD cards isn't very easy. And now that I have several smokers, and several servo dampers, and cook on my Kamado is a couple different modes, I would need quite a few SD cards to cover all the scenarios. And I still have plans to build a larger DIY smoker....

To be honest with you, I had been planning on building a HM for my uncle, but I have had more than a few frustrating incidents where my settings get lost or changed and the HM needs to go back to the "lab" and be reconfigured before it works right again. This has cooled me off from giving one to my uncle, cause I don't want him to get frustrated. If the config profiles could be saved and loaded from the HM menu that would give me confidence to hand one of these units off to someone who didnt build it and doesn't have the inside and out knowledge of the unit like you and I do. If I could say, "If the thing doesn't work use the menu to load profile 1" and know that would set the HM just the way I wanted it that would make it kind of dummy proof.

I don't know the ins and outs of communication between the HM and the rPi, but it seems there must be a way to save presets on the SD card and load them into the HM? Perhaps have just one "default" profile that is stored on the HM, and then add code that can load a preset from the SD card into the HM "default" profile? Then reset to default and your done? Grabbing at straws here trying to find a suggestion that might make this happen.....

Can I at least customize the settings of what is loaded when I choose "reset" from the HM menu?
 
You can customize the "Reset" settings by editing the source code, compiling and installing that. However, there's only one probe defined there and it is copied to all probe configs so you'd have to have them all configured identically.

Asking to load a preset from the SD card from the HeaterMeter is sort of like this analogy. You've got a television, you've got a computer which has a hard drive on it. If you connect them with an HDMI cable, can anything you watch on TV be saved to the computer's hard drive? No because the hard drive isn't hooked to the TV and even if it were it would need code to know how to read and write to a hard drive. Now, you can display images from the computer on the hard drive because the computer can display them through the HDMI cable. Can the TV request what image it wants displayed? No.

Yes, one could write a generic interface that changes the "Reset config?" to be a select "Default, Preset 1, Preset 2" which would then send a command to linkmeter "Load preset 1" which linkmeter would then find the profile 1 file and upload it to the HeaterMeter. Then you should probably have webui to configure it. Then how can you remember if Preset 1 is the servo one or the blower one? So they'll need names, which means more configuration, and that won't be displayed on the HeaterMeter so it isn't perfect anyway.

I'm saying it is a doable thing but I don't want to do it because to do it right will take time and I'd rather work on something else.
 
I understand and will stop pushing on it... However, please keep the idea in mind in the future if anything is being redesigned and something like this could be integrated.
 
Yeah I'll keep it on the TODO list. I understand the usefulness of the function, but I don't want to devote time to it right now.

I'd rather work on getting the blower and servo working at the same time, which is doable. That and allowing a switch to change between two network configurations, say AP mode and client mode.
 
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