Please feel free to post reviews of new barbecues, gadgets and of course food. The opinions within the forum are not necessarily that of the web site owner!
Looks pretty cool. You can run your temps, alarms, etc off your ipad, ipod touch or iphone. I asked them a few questions about using it for bbqing:
Hi Ben,
Thank you for contacting us. Here are the answers to your questions: You can use it for BBQ smoking outside. If it raining or wet you may want to cover it with a plastic zip lock bag. It is battery powered and they last approx 60hrs. The app warns you when they are low. You can run the app in the UK and we are looking at launching the Android version early next year, sorry no date. Shipping can be calculated on our site in the shopping cart.
Mmm, in mailed them the other day. So far I can't get mine to alert me at all on the phone albeit vibration or otherwise and I have the latest app both for iPad and iPhone.
I think the problem with it being wifi is that not every one will have access to routing facilities at competitions. Without routing they won't connect or there will be a need to assign static IP' on the devices. Steve is likely to know more about this aspect than me given his radio background but i would assume if wifi is the protocol that is used wouldn't there be an issue with tx & rx without routing?
The current range is pretty good it gets from the bottom of my garden to my bedside table which is better than my redi-chek.
The thing with BT is that there has been lots of work in recent years done on ultra low power, low cost BT devices which makes it ideal for a device like this. Unfortunately WiFi is much more expensive to add into a product, partly because the chipsets are more expensive, partly because you need a bit more software (thus more horsepower) to manage it well and mostly becuase you're going to need more juice to power it. (If you want any kind of range)
It's easy to forget that the LiPo battery in your iPhone is an expensive component that's designed to power that big screen GSM/3G radio, ARM chipset, GPS etc etc
The range issue could be addressed with BT using a higher class of device and possibly a tuned antenna but then you get the same problem with power requirements. I'm not that up on current component prices but I imagine with the volumes these guys will be doing and the price point they want to hit, BT is the only viable option.
I think the iPhone SDK also offers some accessory APIs and it probably offers BT serial port as a profile so the iGrill designers were probably able to buy an off-the-shelf BT chipset with stack and then interface it to the temperature sensors with some simple software on a cheap chip.
All this is before we even get into network management, if you look at the way Stokers work over ethernet, they require static IP's (no DHCP) and you need to run them through a switch, so you end up potentially with a lot of setup effort required.
Just as I suspected Steve to be honest. You are right on the money with the off the shelf bluetooth component. It actually registers as a Headset when pairing prior to the device name appearing.
Well... Like i say its pretty good for indoor cooking but the software could be better for our needs. It would only take someone with some apple or android programming skills and the time to eavesdrop on whats coming over bluetooth to write something really special that would see the entire circuit buy one!
