How many Heatermeter/Raspi built so far

[Richard Apgood]

finished mine on 6/13/2015 looks like it is working. just got my drums for UDS. hope to have it going next week. thinking about the damper and how i want it designed, something with a simple disconnect.

 

[Chris Morris]

Another build done in the UK. Only used it as a sous vide controller so far, but have just fitted the probe jacks tonight ready to try it out on my BBQ at some point in the near future. No plans to hook it up to a blower in the near future though..

A sous vide controller? How is this done?

 

[Dave Furrer]

Got mine up and running last night 7/16. 4.2.4 with TC. Will be doing a first cook tomorrow.

 

[Dave Gee]

A sous vide controller? How is this done?

There's a couple of threads in here about it. On my phone so not easy to link to atm.

Basically you hook the hm to an ssr which you then use to control your cooking device; slow cooker, rice cooker, crock pot etc. I only used my hm on a bbq for the first time last weekend. Done loads of sous vide with it though!

 

[Chris Morris]

Looks like you would only need to get one of these, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10747 or http://www.adafruit.com/product/268

And connect it to the rj-45 on the Heatermeter. Nice.

 

[Chris Morris]

Looks like you would only need to get one of these, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10747 or http://www.adafruit.com/product/268

And connect it to the rj-45 on the Heatermeter. Nice.

 

[Richie]

A bit of a thread revival. Just built my first HM, 4.3. It's a project I've been looking at for a couple of years now, but never really had the drive to do it. I ended up buying a decent soldering station (which will hopefully get a lot of use). My god, how much easier is it to solder with a decent soldering iron than some old piece of crap stick iron, plus some decent solder and a nice circuit board.

Anyway, built it all and powered her up with the HDMI in the TV just to check. RPi test screen. Dangit. Then realised that I actually needed the snapshot image for the RPi3. Loaded that up and voila! Working as intended. Gotta say I'm pretty happy with how easy it was, being an absolute beginner with soldering (took me a little over two hours to solder it all).

What a great project, I'm actually keen to solder a few more up now.

 

[DKendall]

Finished one around August 2016. Once I sealed my WSM, everything has been going fine.

 

[SteveCK]

Does a soldering station really make that big of a difference? I seem to be doing just fine with a $9 stick iron, no hassles or problems.


And to contribute to the topic of the thread, I think I've assembled somewhere between 10-14 HeaterMeters. I never really tallied it up.

 

[Bob Ivey]

It would be interesting to get a figure of how many circuit boards have been sold by the producers of the boards. That might give a somewhat accurate idea of how many have been built. Just wondering.

 

[JToona]

I've got the HM 4.3 in my cart and ready to hit buy. But I had one last question......

Which damper is the best?

 

[Garrett Smith]

Finished a 4.3 a few weeks ago. Just ran the first test yesterday on a 22.5 WSM. I think I need a damper.

 

[Steve_M]

Finished a 4.3 a few weeks ago. Just ran the first test yesterday on a 22.5 WSM. I think I need a damper.

If it's not sealed up well, a damper wont help much.

 

[Steve_M]

Does a soldering station really make that big of a difference? I seem to be doing just fine with a $9 stick iron, no hassles or problems.


And to contribute to the topic of the thread, I think I've assembled somewhere between 10-14 HeaterMeters. I never really tallied it up.

I used $10 iron for years and it worked great, but I'll never go back to using one after switching to a soldering station with proper temperature control. That said I did have to break out the $10 iron a while back to solder on a replacement ceramic heating element on my soldering station!

 

[Richie]

Finished one around August 2016. Once I sealed my WSM, everything has been going fine.

Does a soldering station really make that big of a difference? I seem to be doing just fine with a $9 stick iron, no hassles or problems.

For me, absolutely. I think also have a nicely laid out board with pads helps, and I used Savbit.6 tin/lead/copper solder, which makes it also easier as it wont pull copper from the board. My only other experience with solder was with a stick iron as an electrician for bits and bobs, I bought a Hakko FX888D and it is a dream to work with. Gets upto temp in about 30 seconds, stays at temp (temperature recovery on my stick iron was atrocious) and using the chisel tip, it was just so easy. I ended up desoldering an old power supply and making up a couple of arduino kits for a friend I'm enjoying it so much.

I'm sure if you're super experienced with soldering, then any old thing will do, but when your a learner like me, having that extra help is handy

 

[JThornburgh]

My HM 4.3 is live (mostly), The Case is is the wash tank dissolving support material. I have a large custom Grill & vertical offset smoker that it will be going on, and had an extra large fan, so I opted to supersize "The Micro Damper." This was my first time starting from bare boards for an electronics project, so it took me 2 hours to solder it all togeather. I decided not to build the LCD board because of of the main things that I haven't liked about the Stoker II that i was borrowing was scrolling through the menus on a tiny LCD screen.

 

[John Bostwick]

My HM 4.3 is live (mostly), The Case is is the wash tank dissolving support material. I have a large custom Grill & vertical offset smoker that it will be going on, and had an extra large fan, so I opted to supersize "The Micro Damper." This was my first time starting from bare boards for an electronics project, so it took me 2 hours to solder it all togeather. I decided not to build the LCD board because of of the main things that I haven't liked about the Stoker II that i was borrowing was scrolling through the menus on a tiny LCD screen.

You can use a 4 line lcd, instead of a 2 line

 

[JToona]

Just bought my HM 4.3 parts this afternoon and loaded Snapshot on my RPi3 and have been messing around with with web interface. So hopefully we can add one more soon!

 

[JThornburgh]

You can use a 4 line lcd, instead of a 2 line

I am used to having either a tablet or Laptop on the patio when I'm brewing, so doing so or even using my phone when I'm setting up the BBQ isn't a big deal. It also means that i don't need to find a place to mount the HM, I can just stick it in the island.

I just added the case to thingiverse

 

[JToona]

I think we can add one more HM to the clan!

The wife and I had 8 trick or treaters come to the house last night so we shut it down about 8:00 and I had some unexpected free time.

I got the base board all soldered up last night and it's much easier than I thought it would be. The most difficult thing is bending the resistor leads.

My soldering skills could definitely use some improvement. I started off just heating joints and soldering. It was taking FOREVER so after about 2.5 hours I thought "why don't I use this flux paste I have" and that stuff was WONDERFUL. Brushed some on the board and stuck the components through, added a little solder to the iron tip and then touched the tip to the joint. After about 3 seconds, the solder filled up the joint with a nice looking bead. I knocked out the DIP and RPi connector easy peasy using that method...and the joints don't look like a total hack job!

After soldering for about 3.5 hours I was done with the base board. Not being able to contain myself, I stuck the base board onto the RPi 3 I have and fired it up. Logged into the webui and BAM! I had the configuration screen fully populated! So I grabbed my ET-732 probes and plugged them into the jack and they were reading temps! So stoked about getting this thing hooked up to the WSM and seeing what it'll do! I'm going to work on the LCD tonight and pick up a 2nd RPi (the one used for testing is my Kodi box).

I'm need to learn how to program so I can contribute to this project. Or get a 3D printer. Or both!