Built a DIY smart controller for my curing chamber — looking for feedback from people who actually know what they're doing

[nickincor]

Hey all, I've been lurking here for a while and figured it was time to actually post. I've been making charcuterie at home for a few years and about a year ago I started building a custom controller for my converted wine fridge to replace my cobbled together separate Inkbird units.
What I ended up with is a Raspberry Pi-based system that monitors temp and humidity via a BME280, tracks the weight of hanging product continuously via HX711 + load cells, and controls the fridge and dehumidifier automatically through a relay board. It runs a web dashboard I can pull up on any browser, local network for now, remote monitoring is the next phase. Everything logs to a local database so I can see exactly what happened over the course of a cure.
I've been running it in my own chamber for about a month and it's been solid. Now I'm considering turning it into a product that other people can actually buy rather than build from scratch.
Before I go further down that road I want to gut-check it with people who have more curing experience than me. A few honest questions:

What's the most frustrating part of managing your chamber day to day?
Do you track weight loss over time, and if so how?
Is remote monitoring something you'd actually use, or is checking in person part of the ritual for you?
What would make you trust a piece of kit enough to actually buy it vs. building your own?

Not trying to sell anything here, genuinely trying to understand whether this solves a real problem or just a me problem. Happy to share more details or photos of the setup if anyone's curious.

 

[BugHunter]

I just today made a thread asking if anyone had done something similar, but it was in the electric smoker section. Only after did I see this. I'm new here so keep that in mind. I recently picked up a couple Arduino 4 wifi's to mess around with. My intent was nothing to do with food prep, but, the controller doesn't know if it's controlling a smoker or the space shuttle... All the same in code.

My experience in the past has all been design of machine controls and systems, and the scratch-built embedded stuff used Microchip products. I began with the board design, had boards proto'd and went from there. So more work than is needed nowadays. I worked with their stuff since their portfolio was just a few processors, long before even the 16F84 Many projects for actual industry as well as plenty just for fun.

I had a coal stove "control", (piece of garbage 555 timer in a box with a PCB relay) that took a dump this winter and the price of it was so insane I vowed I'd simply replace the entire thing myself. I hated that thing anyway. Literally, <$1 in parts, for this specialized gizmo they wanted north of $200 for. Yea guys, sorry but yer smok'n some'thin controlled by the DEA. Took a couple days, but using an Arduino 3 I built a gizmo with the barometric safeties, accurate controls, and a dead reliable operation using SSRs. Nothing mechanical. It ran all winter without so much as a touch.

I've never used a Raspberry Pi but I've seen em obviously, and one platform is the same as the next. Arduino sadly was just purchased by Oracle, so I might be dumping that platform in the near future. They're already moving away from open source. It's the end for Arduino. Sad...

I think the biggest issue would be is having something that works regardless of the equipment it's connected to. I can't imagine it would be something worth attempting to market. As a diy project, sure. And is it worth something? Sure. Would I pay for someone else's idea? Probably yes. But would I charge for it? Probably not. Lol.

Pics would be cool. I can read the functionality seems to work great for ya. May I assume you're connected to a MySql db on your own network? I was looking into the Arduino code for external access to a web db, which I pay for a server for. I downloaded it but never got around to adding it to my other little project, which was on the "4 wifi" which I set up as an access point / wifi server.

 

[verbage]

This is great! You might also find something interesting in PorkPi, an RPi system that @hjbct wrote about here a while back. See:

https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/curing-chamber-raspberry-pi-humidity-fluctuation.240436/
and
https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/porkpi-latest-batch.252528/

 

[slow_cure]

The load cells are the genuinely clever part of this. Continuous weight tracking means you get percent weight loss as a live curve instead of a weekly guess on a kitchen scale, and weight loss is the endpoint everyone actually cures to. I'd surface that as the headline number in your UI, projected days to 35-40% loss per hanging item.

Two suggestions from the software side. Log history and alert on excursions, a single RH spike while you're on vacation matters more than the current reading ever does. And mount the BME280 away from the evaporator and door, mid-chamber near the product, otherwise you're controlling to the coldest wettest corner of the fridge instead of what the meat sees. Curious whether the single sensor reads close to what a second one would say at the other end.