Hi guys,
I bought your DS18B20 sensors for my setup. I haven’t completed my build yet, but in the meantime, I am planning to smoke a large brisket next week, and I’m interested in using the Spark and temp probes to monitor smoking temp (no PIDs, just monitoring). The grill will be at 225ºF for about 12-18 hours. I notice that the sensors you advertise have a “high temperature silicone cable”. Do you think they will withstand this environment? I’ll have one sensor in the grill box reading air temperature, and one sensor in the meat. I will do this at my own risk and won’t complain to you if the sensors melt, but I’m curious if you even think this is worth trying.
@Elco this will be a “low and slow” bbq, and the grill will be set at about 105-110C (Traeger-brand electric smoker). I’m going to give it a try and I’ll watch it closely for the first couple hours to see if it looks like the cable is melting. I think that with these high-temp silicone cables, it should be able to handle those conditions. I’ll let you know! I definitely would never try this on a normal bbq at 300C, but on the smoker, it just might work!
Maybe first run a heat test before potentially coating your bbq meat with silicone.
If you have a different sensor that can be hooked up to a Pi, you can still use the resulting data in Brewblox graphs. Typically it’d involve some variant of this. I’m currently setting up some humidity / air quality sensors using that approach.
Thanks Bob. Good to know about the expansibility of the platform. I might have just enough python skills to figure this out. I’ll keep it in mind, as I’ve considered getting some thermocouple sensors and a Max31856 board. For next week, I’m going to try it with the DS18B20, and I’ll do the heat test first as you suggested!
You could use the automation service to trigger some webhook if temp > X, but disintegrating temp sensors are equally likely to report -20 degC as they are to disconnect.
ideally, it would trigger an alarm before it disintegrates, i.e. at 120C. I’ll take a look at the automation service docs. Thanks for getting back to me.
Hey Bob, thanks for the tip on webhooks. I figured out how to trigger a push notification via the webhooks and notifications services on IFTTT. One thing that was confusing is that I couldn’t figure out how to use temp sensors as the block value for the precondition. I was able to get it work using the temp sensor as input to PID and use the PID input value for the precondition, but this seems convoluted. Is it possible to just use the measured value of the temp sensor to satisfy the precondition.
ALSO, I noticed a bug. The degF option in the automation service is not working. When I try to set a condition to be in degF, it defaults back to degC. It wouldn’t really be a problem except that it does seem to affect the performance of the automation service. If the UI units are set to F, it will not work with the automation service as it is, because only C works. I’ll wear the title of “Annoying American”
Measured value for temp sensor should be a valid target. A workaround typically involved using a setpoint, but the PID would also work.
We’re about to rework how value comparisons work. I’ll make sure to double check sensor values and degF usage.
Edit: which release are you using? I checked against the current version, and can’t reproduce the issue with being unable to select a sensor. (The degF select bug does reproduce)
