British BBQ Society Forums

That's hilarious that you posted this. A coworker of mine (another engineer) showed me that last week because its EXACTLY like our day to day experiences with management.

Outstanding!

Have you tried the autotune algorithm? I've always wondered how some of those would work on something with such a slow response time. I suppose with blowers, the up-side resonse could be pretty fast. With a ceramic grill, temperature drop is always very slow. Thus, it is of great interest never to ...

What kind of algorithym did you use on your device to stabilise the temperature? PID? I'm finding it hard to tune this as the input and resulting outputs are so laggy.

I started with PID, but evolved a lot from there in a variety of ways.

Are you familiar with Ziegler-Nichols tuning method? I ...

Incidentally, for my project, I used a Microchip PIC18F controller chip and just built a board for it to go into. The chip retails for about 1 pound if you're buying only one of them. Then, of course, a few more are needed for the rest of the parts. Electronic components are amazingly inexpensive!

I've gotcha (I think - I tend to leave such matters to the experts!). So, the arduino isn't strictly necessary for a PID controlled setup, but provides an easy to use interface for the control of said PID unit?

Yeah, Aris explains it well. In general, digital devices that control everything in ...

@robgunby - thanks! I appreciate the clarification too. I've seen pictures of the setups you're talking about but never knew the name.

@Aris - It is strongly rooted in PID, but there are a great deal of heuristics that needed to be baked into it for excellent robustness, and "fool proofing." You'll ...

Nice idea. I've seen similar for a UDS where it uses a servo to open and close the air-flow to the vents.

Is this a commercial idea, or are you open-sourcing it?

Hi Aris,

So far, it's neither. It is sort of a hobby project that spiraled out of control. I've been excited to show it around and ...

Greetings all,

I got my large BGE in 2010, and have loved it and used it extensively. I wanted a temperature controller so I could do other things (such as sleep) while smoking or drying things.

I've chipped away at a few iterations of one over the last couple of years, and am now completely ...