Best Temperature Controller Right Now

piperpilot

Toxarch said:

The Smobot is $280 msrp? Eff That! I'd much rather pick up a Flame Boss 200 or a Stoker for an extra $20. 

Thats a clearance price on the FB 200... their MSRP on their wifi controller is $349.  I wouldn't expect that $300 price to last long.

SMOBOT is still $50 cheaper right now and $70 cheaper when you compare both at MSRP.  Stoker is also $350 when you add the BGE adapter and the extra food probe.

Photo Egg

piperpilot said:

Toxarch said:

The Smobot is $280 msrp? Eff That! I'd much rather pick up a Flame Boss 200 or a Stoker for an extra $20. 

Thats a clearance price on the FB 200... their MSRP on their wifi controller is $349.  I wouldn't expect that $300 price to last long.

SMOBOT is still $50 cheaper right now and $70 cheaper when you compare both at MSRP.  Stoker is also $350 when you add the BGE adapter and the extra food probe.

Flame Boss 200 for $250.00
http://www.firecraft.com/product/flame-boss-200-wifi-universal-fb200-u
Flame Boss 300 for $330.00
http://www.firecraft.com/product/flame-boss™-300-kit-kamado

Both free shipping above as well.

blind99

bgebrent said:

blind99 said:

bgebrent said:

JohnInCarolina said:

A good old-fashioned chair and beer seems to work for me.  

That and the bottom vent.

Wiseasses 

i want wifi on everything!

Cheater newbie 

@bgebrent my wifi even has wifi

dstearn

Photo Egg said:

I have no fight in the world domination of brands, but how many different times do you have knowledge of the FB site going down?
The bigger issue would be local provider going down but this does not stop the unit from continuing to work and controlling the cook. When service comes back up it automatically hooks back up.

I do not have a log although there have been several instances reported in the past where service was not available due to Web errors.  I am sure that the FB units work fine, my preference is not being reliant on a service being up or down. 

Photo Egg

dstearn said:

Photo Egg said:

I have no fight in the world domination of brands, but how many different times do you have knowledge of the FB site going down?
The bigger issue would be local provider going down but this does not stop the unit from continuing to work and controlling the cook. When service comes back up it automatically hooks back up.

I do not have a log although there have been several instances reported in the past where service was not available due to Web errors.  I am sure that the FB units work fine, my preference is not being reliant on a service being up or down. 

Every wi-fi controller on the market relies on a service once you leave your home wi-fi signal range. But no reason to argue about personal choices.
Glad you like what ever you are using.

Toxarch

Mikea5232 said:

Toxarch said:

The Smobot is $280 msrp? Eff That! I'd much rather pick up a Flame Boss 200 or a Stoker for an extra $20. 

I've got a Stoker and love it. Use it all the time on low and slow cooks. Sitting outside getting drunk alone by the grill doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather go prep food, cook sides, watch TV, go mow the lawn, work in the garage, go sleep at night, hop online, go for a walk, whatever. The Stoker let's me do those things if I want while the food cooks. If I need to check it, I can do that from my phone. And I can run multiple grills with one box.

It does take some tech savvy to set it up but that's easy for me. Though I haven't figured out how to get it to work over the internet yet. My router hates port forwarding.

I set up the cyber q this weekend.   If you watch there how-to videos it might help you set up your stoker. Setting up the router to allow the stoker to talk to it might be very similar. 

Now if your internet provider is issuing you a different IP address than what your router has, you will have to call them and have them issue you a new port for your router and stoker to communicate on. 

The Stoker wants Port 80 forwarded. One, that's the port for HTTP so not the best choice for a network. Two, as soon as I attempt to forward that port, it freezes up my router. Can't do anything other than reset it back to factory. I'm fine with only using it over WiFi around the house rather than opening up a door to the web. Thought about doing a DMZ to a second router and using that for the Stoker and maybe the Playstation. Doesn't matter if someone gets into those. But then I'd have to go through the web to access the Stoker all the time. Haven't decided on that one yet.

Toxarch

piperpilot said:

Toxarch said:

The Smobot is $280 msrp? Eff That! I'd much rather pick up a Flame Boss 200 or a Stoker for an extra $20. 

Thats a clearance price on the FB 200... their MSRP on their wifi controller is $349.  I wouldn't expect that $300 price to last long.

SMOBOT is still $50 cheaper right now and $70 cheaper when you compare both at MSRP.  Stoker is also $350 when you add the BGE adapter and the extra food probe.

Stoker with BGE adapter is $297. Add the food probe for $35. So $333 for the Stoker. Once set up, easy (not really cheap) to add as many probes and fans as you want for numerous grills.
The FB200 can be had for $250. That's the same price as the Smobot deal but then you have to wait to see if they even make the Smobot and ship it.

Ask people how much they are enjoying their Kickstarter Meater whose ship dated got pushed back over and over. Last update was that it was supposed to ship this last January. $2,751,194 USD total funds raised, 1251%  funded on October 22, 2015 and they still haven't shipped anything out. Smobot isn't even going to reach their funding goal.

We all know the top vent on the egg gets caked up with soot and whatever else. What happens with the Smobot vent gets caked up and can't operate? Will that motor wear out from fighting the gunk on the vent? I don't know. Nobody really does because they aren't in production.

stlcharcoal

dstearn said:

Photo Egg said:

I have no fight in the world domination of brands, but how many different times do you have knowledge of the FB site going down?
The bigger issue would be local provider going down but this does not stop the unit from continuing to work and controlling the cook. When service comes back up it automatically hooks back up.

I do not have a log although there have been several instances reported in the past where service was not available due to Web errors.  I am sure that the FB units work fine, my preference is not being reliant on a service being up or down. 

The FB will still work if their server goes down (has happened 3 times in 2 yrs that I remember.)  The unit will continue to maintain temp, sound alarms, etc, you just can't monitor/adjust it from your phone.  That should be solved later this year with a new app and hardware in the 300 that will leave the server out of the mix (and link directly to your phone if you're within a few hundred feet.)

MichaelCollins

Hi all,

I want to share Roger's, Flame Boss co-founder, comments on security and cloud service uptime. He is the one that knows how to respond to the sincere concerns about these issues. It may help people decide how much security and dependability they can expect.

"During my life before Flame Boss, I worked on several information security products: a certified secure operating system, an Internet firewall, and a PIN protection device for banks. So I have a high respect for network security. Flame Boss uses encryption and authentication in a way that I think is effective for our application. We have many thousands of controllers in the field and so far no security incidents have been reported.

We have 100% geographically separate redundancy in our cloud infrastructure. If our server in West Palm Beach, Florida goes down for any reason, another continuously replicated backup server in Hudson, Wisconsin, will become the new server. Such fail-overs have happened twice since we started operation so we know it works.

Here's a 3rd party report about our availability showing 99.99% availability this year."

Since: July 27, 2015

Outages: 36

Total Uptime: 99.784%

Monitor: Every 5 minutes

Last Check: April 4, 2017 at 04:56 PM GMT-05:00

Average response time: 0.227 seconds

Current Status: Ok

YEAR	OUTAGES / CHECKS	UPTIME
➤  2017	2 / 26861	99.985%
➤  2016	5 / 95717	99.971%
➤  2015	29 / 45240	99.271%

HeavyG

Toxarch said:

piperpilot said:

Toxarch said:

The Smobot is $280 msrp? Eff That! I'd much rather pick up a Flame Boss 200 or a Stoker for an extra $20. 

Thats a clearance price on the FB 200... their MSRP on their wifi controller is $349.  I wouldn't expect that $300 price to last long.

SMOBOT is still $50 cheaper right now and $70 cheaper when you compare both at MSRP.  Stoker is also $350 when you add the BGE adapter and the extra food probe.

Stoker with BGE adapter is $297. Add the food probe for $35. So $333 for the Stoker. Once set up, easy (not really cheap) to add as many probes and fans as you want for numerous grills.
The FB200 can be had for $250. That's the same price as the Smobot deal but then you have to wait to see if they even make the Smobot and ship it.

Ask people how much they are enjoying their Kickstarter Meater whose ship dated got pushed back over and over. Last update was that it was supposed to ship this last January. $2,751,194 USD total funds raised, 1251%  funded on October 22, 2015 and they still haven't shipped anything out. Smobot isn't even going to reach their funding goal.

We all know the top vent on the egg gets caked up with soot and whatever else. What happens with the Smobot vent gets caked up and can't operate? Will that motor wear out from fighting the gunk on the vent? I don't know. Nobody really does because they aren't in production.

Actually the Meater project started shipping units to the earliest backers a week or two ago.

While it is looking like the SmoBot project may not make its Kickstarter goal I'm pretty confident that they will still be assembling and selling units either way.

Also, some folks here on this forum have been using beta units of the SmoBot for at least a year and are quite happy with it and how it functions so your concerns about how it operates is based on your ignorance of the product and not reality.

Legume

HeavyG said:

Also, some folks here on this forum have been using beta units of the SmoBot for at least a year and are quite happy with it and how it functions so your concerns about how it operates is based on your ignorance of the product and not reality.

Nice response inspector gadget.

tarheelmatt

Legume said:

HeavyG said:

Also, some folks here on this forum have been using beta units of the SmoBot for at least a year and are quite happy with it and how it functions so your concerns about how it operates is based on your ignorance of the product and not reality.

Nice response inspector gadget.

It's all fun and games till someone is called ignorant.  

HeavyG

We're all ignorant about a lot of things. Never thought it was an insult to be called ignorant about something.

I'll try to remember that some consider that to be a trigger or microaggression.

SmokingPiney

My FB200 is still hooking me up each and every time I need it. 

bgebrent

HeavyG said:

We're all ignorant about a lot of things. Never thought it was an insult to be called ignorant about something.

I'll try to remember that some consider that to be a trigger or microaggression.

That's hilarious, and true.  "Microaggression", what has this world come too?

lousubcap

I would offer that a face-to-face ignorant comment is taken with a lot more understanding then today's "toss it out and see what happens approach."  Besides, then you front up with the other side of the conversation. Both will likely learn from the exchange-

Spaceman

Flameboss works for me. Reliable and extremely easy setup. Very pleased. Not so pleased with units made by others. 

Toxarch

Call me ignorant about the Smobot if you want. I couldn't care less about some overpriced controller. I must have been the one that triggered some microaggression to get called ignorant about some product I have no interest in. My bad. Didn't know you cared so much about it.

So they actually shipped out a few Meater probes? That's amazing since they were only 14 months past their original ship date of January 2016. Some people went nuts with numerous threads when RTIC coolers shipped 4 months late.

Speaking of coolers, read up on The Coolest Cooler, the 2nd highest funded Kickstarter campaign (at the time) with over $13 Million raised and 60,000 upset funders. People got the coolers, but it wasn't the funders.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/18/9758214/coolest-cooler-amazon-kickstater-shipping-production-delay

I do hope you get the Smobot if you ordered one and hope it works great for you.

NPHuskerFL

Stoker. I wouldn't consider myself uber techy. Easy setup, reliable, expandable and dead on balls accurate. It's an industry term.

Hotch

One thing I have learned about the Stoker over using it the past 3-4 years, and looking at my Stoker Log graphs, is it's ability to learn the rate of cook temp increase. Thus allowing it to turn off the fan prior to the temp set point or pulse the fan in short bursts.
It seems to calculate and anticipate the temp rise over time to hit it's set point. Many times I have set the temp point with a window of only 2-3 degrees. It hits the mark every time. That said I usually have a 10-20 degree window and it also works great.

whldch

I bought a cybrrq wifi a month or so ago and got it set up pretty quickly on my wifi. Still working on setting up remotely. I did a 3 hr cook on my xl, more to try it out than necessity. It held temp to within 5 degrees and gave me temps for 2 slabs. If I had a third it would read me that as well. I'm very pleased with it. 

Mikea5232

@whldch Bbq guru has a great how-to video on setting the cyber q up remotely fyi.  

GregW

I have owned a a BBQ Guru, the older one that had the hand held wireless controller. Very expensive at the time around $500. It was not very good and only lasted a couple of years.
I've had a second generation Stoker Wifi for a few years now. It has never failed me and is very versatile. It can be a bit of a challenge to get the Wifi setup, but a secret I've learned is to setup a guest wifi network without security and lock it down to the Stoker's mac address. This makes the network only accessible to the Stoker and eliminates the need for the Stoker to be compatible with the encryption method I'm running on the rest of the network.

I use the Stoker just as frequently to simply monitor the food and smoker temps of all of my other smokers in addition to the egg. 

The market for temp controllers seems to be flooded now that the Chinese have figured out how to make them.

whldch

Mikea5232 said:

@whldch Bbq guru has a great how-to video on setting the cyber q up remotely fyi.  


Ive watched it and followed it with no luck. There are a few postings and tips on other sites. I think I'm close but so far I haven't been able to connect remotely. From what I read I'm not alone. I don't know how much I'll need the remote setup but it's good to know how to do it. 

GregW

I don't know about the cyber q, but on my stoker I signed up for a free external IP address at noip.com. I then allowed that IP to connect to the local stoker IP.
For simplicity I placed the IP/mac address of the stoker in the dmz on my router.