So I was looking at Tom Kole's latest awesomeness and it got me thinking.. If you have a RJ11 cable for the fan and servo you could make that pretty long.. maybe. Then I have a question, anyone use extensions for the probes like http://goo.gl/PUhnqS . My thought is that if I got say 25 feet or so for all connections.. I could keep the HeaterMeter inside and safe from the rain. Any thoughts, experiences ?
Extension wires for Probes
- Thread starter Jon Zoss
- Start date
Bryan Mayland
TVWBB Hall of Fame
It should work but you'll either need 2.5mm cables or an adapter on each end to convert it from the 3.5mm cable you linked to the 2.5mm mono that the probes/jacks are.
RalphTrimble
TVWBB Diamond Member
The HM does have the ability to use a wireless probe (a single probe), but I don't think the design has ever been finalized, particularly the grill side interface. I think it can be done though (Bryan has one) if you want to experiment.
I had suggested that perhaps a good way to design a wireless system would be to use two HM boards with wireless boards on them to allow them to communicate with each other, then populate the grill side board with the probe and fan hardware, and populate the other (controller) HM board with the hardware to communicate with the rPi. I passed this idea on to Bryan and he has considered it, but he is the one that would have to code it and so it's one of those things that are on the to-do list, or perhaps the to be considered list. So far I haven't heard anything about it actually happening but HM development keeps marching on, so who knows, maybe one day it will happen....
I had suggested that perhaps a good way to design a wireless system would be to use two HM boards with wireless boards on them to allow them to communicate with each other, then populate the grill side board with the probe and fan hardware, and populate the other (controller) HM board with the hardware to communicate with the rPi. I passed this idea on to Bryan and he has considered it, but he is the one that would have to code it and so it's one of those things that are on the to-do list, or perhaps the to be considered list. So far I haven't heard anything about it actually happening but HM development keeps marching on, so who knows, maybe one day it will happen....
RalphTrimble
TVWBB Diamond Member
If you are going to use wire to extend the probes, you could use a CAT5 jack on the HM unit... The servo + fan require 5 wires, that leaves 3 unused wires. The servo connection, however, does include a ground which I'm pretty sure would be ok to use as the ground for all the probes. So you could use one CAT5 cable from the HM to the grill, on the grill side put three 2.5mm jacks and use the three spare wires (and gnd from the servo) to connect the jacks for three probes. Inside the HM you jumper over the input for the first three probes to the CAT5 connector and you should be able to run the whole thing off of a single CAT5 cable (in theory). This way you just plug your probes into your jacks on your fan/servo adapter and use a standard CAT5 cable of whatever length you need between the grill and the HM. However, since the temperature is measured by reading the resistance of the probes I'm not sure if the extra wire would cause the readings to be off, if so, perhaps you could compensate with an offset in the HM config.