Setting up my HeaterMeter - battery power and headless


 
AndyR said:
Holy cow I had to tape over the bottom vents on the WSM. I'm trying to run at 270F, but it would fluctuate 20 degrees in mere seconds! I love seeing that data, I never would have seen that with the smoothing that the Maverick had built in. I put some foil tape over the vents and it seems to be much more stable now.
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I have all my vents plugged, except the top, which always runs full open when I'm cooking. The tighter you can make the smoker, the "better" the HM will manage the temperatures. When you get wind gust blowing into a mostly closed door,or a slightly ajar bottom vent it can cause all sorts of havoc with temp spikes.
 
It's still running strong, no issues overnight. It's interesting to see when the wind finally stopped gusting so much at around 5:30am. Next to no fluctuations. I also noticed that my old Maverick probes/device were not matching the new stuff. I stuck the thermapen in the meat right in the same spot as the other two probes and it matched the new one exactly. Apparently the old probes go off over time? I will have to Google that one. They are both off quite a bit. The meat probe is 5F off, the air temp one is almost 10F off right now.

And the battery is fine, too!
 
Steve_M said:
I'm pretty sure pitdroid is just using the hmstatus JSON, so it should be pretty simple to replicate.
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With Jason's code changes last week and a little bit of 'salt' added from me, the Espress Module is emulating the JSON so that it works with PitDroid. I just tried it out and it works. No Graphs though, I don't know the json/url format that it/HM does....
 
AndyR said:
Yup, I will give this a shot one of these days.
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Yeah that should be interesting to see if it works, because all it would have to do is supply the /lm/hmstatus json
Code: 
{"time":1483132470,"set":60,"lid":0,
  "fan":{"c":0,"a":0,"f":0},"adc":[0,0,0,0,0,0],
  "temps":[
    {"n":"Probe 0","c":null,"a":{"l":-40,"h":-244,"r":null}},
    {"n":"Probe 1","c":null,"a":{"l":-40,"h":200,"r":null}},
    {"n":"Probe 2","c":null,"a":{"l":-40,"h":-200,"r":null}},
    {"n":"Probe 3","c":null,"a":{"l":-40,"h":-200,"r":null}}
  ]
}
I think all you need is the set, fan.c, temps[].n and temps[].c (for name and current temp). I don't believe PitDroid uses any of the other data. The ESP code has a webserver anyway right? So all it would need is a handler for the URI.
 
I just got done jamming overdone brisket flat down my piehole. There are worse things. I love the HM, love the esp wifi, etc! I'm declaring a great success, but I'm going to see how long I can run this on the battery. I bet I can get 5+ full cooks. I did that brisket for 22 hours (too long, what was I thinking, it is my nemesis). The battery is down to 12.50v now, which is pretty good. It hasn't been turned off since Tuesday, half that time running the fan and reading the probes, wifi the whole time.
 
Andy if you want an industrial fan buy the pit viper from BBQ Gruru, I have a modified fan damper for that. Plus the pit viper has a nice Weber plug in adapter for those units.
Go to here https://www.bbqguru.com/storenav?CategoryId=2&ProductId=44
Get the fan and then get the adapter for it. PM me and I will either print or send you the damper. It is a bit expensive to set this fan up, around 70 dollars but it is bulletproof and will work well. Stay away from axial fans.
 
Andrew - Thanks for the offer, but I don't think I need a damper. I looked into the Pit Viper for a fan, but I'm using a "burner" underneath the charcoal grate so I rigged up my own using the blower recommended by the HM parts list. It all worked really well in the wind.
 
Just a little update if anyone is still paying attention. I've had the unit powered up for 10 days now. Battery voltage is down to 12.12v. I will be doing a turkey or two this weekend and I'll run it the way it is, just for grins. I'm sure it will be fine, that's a pretty quick cook.

I am also going to modify the air burner to blow some more air toward the outside of the coal grate. I have plenty of blower capacity remaining so I'll just put a few sideways holes in the burner.
 
Haha, wow! I did not expect it to be able to last that long. So if that's 18Ah = at least 10 days, then a standard 8Ah UPS battery could do a 24 hour cook without even putting a real dent in the battery.
 
Bryan Mayland said:
Haha, wow! I did not expect it to be able to last that long. So if that's 18Ah = at least 10 days, then a standard 8Ah UPS battery could do a 24 hour cook without even putting a real dent in the battery.
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I should have used the 8ah battery, it's half the size and price. I've done two full cooks for a total of almost 48 hours of running the blower (hovered from 5-20% most of the time), but I also ran the fan for probably another 20 hours at 100% as well during testing and once when the fuel ran out. The whole unit has been outside in the weather (currently 8F), too, so the hardest possible conditions for the battery, too.

You could run the thing and charge the battery with a small solar panel if you wanted to be reeeeally cool. I might grab one to play with (this is a hobby, right?).
 
Down to 12.00 volts now. I hooked up the ammeter and it's (esp8266, heatermeter, and blower together) drawing:

270mA with the blower at 100%
200mA @ 25%
80mA @ 3%
40mA @ 0%

So at 3% fan, the unit will run for 9 days continuously on my 18Ah battery. I found that 1-5% was typical for many hours during my test cooks (windy and cold). The worst-case scenario is 100% fan, and at that speed it will still run for almost 3 days.

I'm going to grab a cheap TEG module to mess with and see if that can keep it charged up.
 
Just another update and then I'm probably done updating for a while :) I ran the fan at 100% for a whole day and got the voltage down to 11.35v. Ran it for a couple more days w/o the fan and it got down to 11.30. Now it's smoking me a turkey. Without screwing around like I have been I think I could literally get 25 cooks out of this. On my WSM it runs at 100% for 20 minutes or so to get it up to temp, then settles in at 1-10% for the rest of the cook.

I ran a cook for 23 hours straight in 20mph wind around 10F ambient on about 12lbs of Grove lump at 230F pit temp. This is about twice as efficient as without the HM and air burner.

Here's the current cook, started at about 9am central today. I am using what's left of the 15lb bag of grove and a pile of KBB mixed in. It's 6F with just a light breeze for this cook.:

http://nailbuster.com/thingspeak/in...=206188&thingurl=api.thingspeak.com&thingInt=

Here's a shot of the startup of the cook. I was fiddling with the vent on top too much so it overshot a little, but settled in nicely:

30d9a68451
 
Just another little update. I still haven't charged the battery, I don't even measure the voltage any more. I'm sure it's getting down to charging time. Right now I'm pasteurizing some cider (hard) and just using it for monitoring the temps. The Anova is doing all the heavy lifting though. Nice smokey cider lol.
 
I did some testing and when when the battery went low enough to stop the HM it burned up my wireless dongle and corrupted the sdcard. The rPi wouldn't even boot after that. I was able to reformat my card, but the wifi was a goner.

I did a 16h cook, off three pork buts (~9 lbs each) and a 12 lb brisket and it ran just fine on my 8ah UPS battery and it is still testing at 12.7V. I removed the rPi because I didn't need it, nor want to burn up another wifi.

david
 
D Peart said:
I did some testing and when when the battery went low enough to stop the HM it burned up my wireless dongle and corrupted the sdcard. The rPi wouldn't even boot after that. I was able to reformat my card, but the wifi was a goner.

I did a 16h cook, off three pork buts (~9 lbs each) and a 12 lb brisket and it ran just fine on my 8ah UPS battery and it is still testing at 12.7V. I removed the rPi because I didn't need it, nor want to burn up another wifi.
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This is why I'd like to have a voltmeter in the software somewhere. There's ADC's on the ESP, or I can use one of the unused ports on the AVR since I'm not running buttons or a display. I don't expect anything to burn up, though.

Andrew F said:
Wouldn't the alcohol in the cider negate the need to pasteurize it?
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Not if you want nice sweet bubbly cider. It's not to kill pathogens or other bados, the alcohol and sulfite takes care of those. It's to kill the yeast once the cider has reached the level of carbonation I desire, but still leaves some unfermented sugar.
 
FYI this is still plugging along without any issues. I'm using MQTT to get data to my phone when I'm not around, but otherwise it's the same setup.
 
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