OT: Michigan Weather and Smobot

bob.bud

It never got above 45 degrees today (at least, that is what the app on my phone indicated), and I actually saw a few small flakes and later tiny hail fall - some of this during my cook of two spatchcocked birds.

I won't bore you with any shots of the birds; you have seen plenty of those on this forum. This post is about the wacky weather and the performance of the Smobot.

As in my previous cook with the Smobot, the unit did its job and controlled the temp and allowed me to do those other enjoyable things one does when cooking on the egg. However, the temp plot for this cook showed more fluctuation in temp as the Smobot "hunted" to stay on the set temp. 

In the past year of egging (May makes one year for me), I have become pretty adept at manually controlling temp; however, I have been guilty of fussing and over an undershooting with my tweaks. I don't believe if I did fuss with the vents on this particular day absent the Smobot that I would have done nearly as well as the Smobot did.

Posting my cooks temp results to the Smobot forum, I immediately received an email from Eric and he noted that the behavior to the cook was not normal behavior, and he asked that I checked the default settings but did not suspect that they were in err.

I was not alarmed by the fluctuations, but did find them odd, as the previous cook was rock solid. I was content with chalking it up to the weather; however, through my conversations in email with Eric he convinced me otherwise and said that he would work through it with me on my next cook.

Eric easily could have let me believe that the fluctuations were due to the weather we were experiencing here in Michigan, but he instead looked at the product Smobot is developing and looking to improve it - he also is in Michigan (not too far from me) and indicated he has fired up his cooker to run some tests of his own.

If you ask me, with his drive I believe the production version of the Smobot is going to be a great product and will likely be one of those products users will say has great customer service.

Keep it up Eric and the Smobot team.

reinhart36

Thanks for the complements!

I verified that you did indeed expose a bug in the algorithm, by the way.  I always start my cooks and tests the same way, but your startup was different than my norm - and served as a very useful data point in this case.

I've reproduced, identified, and corrected the bug since I emailed you, and all should be well after you download firmware v0.6.  We'll release that very soon..

Funny - when it rains it pours, and @xiphoid007 exposed the exact same never-before-seen bug today, just after you did..

Thanks for being a great sport!

Kind regards,
Eric