Just A Heads Up, Not Sure How Long This Will Last!

[zachd]

I will as well

 

[Binford 6100]

For $25 I grabbed one as well, I am sure it won't replace my Thermoworks Smoke as my primary, I also have a DOT. But there have been a few times when a couple of extra probes would come in handy, so for that price why not!

Just an FYI, what some folks do with BT devices, is use an old phone, to connect to it, and connect to home wifi, lots of different apps, options from there that makes it a device you can access from anywhere on the internet. I can do some playing and a write up if anyone is interested once I get it.

i would be interested in that. i wouldn't know how to do that.
basically use the old phone as a bridge to your current phone?

 

[petehalsted]

i would be interested in that. i wouldn't know how to do that.
basically use the old phone as a bridge to your current phone?

Correct, the simplest way is by using a screen/share control app. There are ones that work phone2phone, pc2phone, etc.

Depending on the actual thermometer app, there might be more elegant ways to do it as well, once I get a chance to play I will let you know.

 

[Binford 6100]

Mine showed up today, upon initial inspection I'm impressed with the overall quality. good long probes, stainless steel braid covering the wires, nice little stand for the meter, and two clips for smoke temp.
overall so far its exceeding my low expectations of a 25$ amazon impulse buy.

Beer can for probe lenght reference.

 

[Binford 6100]

Has a temp graph which could help with the dreaded stall??

A quick test of the first probe. Got to 98 very quickly. And started to go down quickly as well. Seems to work correctly

 

[petehalsted]

Got mine yesterday as well.

Computer geek in me won out over smoker geek, and I played all day with hacking the thing.

First as promised, a bit of info on how to see it from wifi, across town, state, universe. Info is Android based as that is all I use. You need a screen sharing app/Phone Control app.

Easiest I have found is AirDroid, it gets a bit complicated if you want to control the phone from pc/browser, but if you just want to see screen real easy. The security of android is what makes control complicated to setup, so will be similar with any app.

Now get yourself an old phone (doesn't have to have cell service, if you can get to your wifi from smoker area). Setup Airdroid on it, pair it to the InkBird, connect it to your wifi, setup Airdroid on the phone, and set yourself up an account.

Now you can log into airdroid from any browser and view that phones screen. Like I said only view, to control it, move screen, change settings, etc. you will need to jump through some extra hoops to enable remote, airdroid has info about how to do on their site, and it works fine, no need to root phone, although if dedicating an old phone to this task, rooting it would be the "best" option.

Anyway, once I verified I could get that done, I then setup to see if I could access the Bluetooth data directly. And for the most part it was surprisingly easy. I used a sniffer program to watch the devices data, and not to get to technical, but it is simply sending a 12 byte stream, that contains the values for the 6 probes, each temp is represent by 2 bytes, and if you convert it to decimal, each degree C is a value of 10, so 20 = 2 C, 30 = 3 C, etc.

This brought to light a few interesting things:

1. The reason the temp range is 0-250 C, it can not report a value below 0000 which is 0 C, so this would probably not be a good thermometer if you also want it to do freezer duty.

2. It never reports values other than by a factor of 10, which means it only reports whole degrees C. It will never report 50.2 C, etc.

3. Because of #2, if you put it in F mode, there are certain temps you will never see, this drove me nuts as I was trying to debug it and figure out what it was sending. It always reports in C and then just converts to F, and because it doesn't do fractions and rounds, you will never see 76,78,80,83,85,87,89, etc. In fact this means to some extent it makes it less accurate in F mode because there are times where it jumps 2 degrees. Let's talk temp range we care about
You will see 225,230 (but never 224,227,229)
you will never see 240 (but will see 239,241)
you will see 250 (but never 249,251) - this is one of the "bad ones", the 3 temps you get in F mode are 248,250,252.
I know that isn't a big deal in terms of smoking, but if you are a gadget geek with a PID that holds to 1 degree, then it might bug you that you can't hit that same # of this.

So armed with that info I set out to try to read the device myself, and I have somewhat done it. Their app does some type of "authorization" that activates the device, if I try to connect to it directly, after a bit it disconnects me. So I haven't been able to eliminate their app, but as long as their app is running, I can "eavesdrop" on the conversation and get the value of all 6 probes back, which means I can then send them to the "cloud" and create my own smoke data store, graphs etc.

If there is a blue tooth / hardware geek on the group that wants to look at what I have done and see if they can figure out what the initial handshake is that their app is doing, so that part could be eliminated, just PM me.

Here's a screen shot of my little proof of concept app reading 2 probes. I know best screen design ever, right! :-)

 

[keithd]

FWIW the 50% off thing is still active as of 4 Sep 2018 @ noon CST.
I'd think that 1 deg C is plenty precise for BBQ, right? I wish the upper limit was higher, but for only smoking even that should be sufficient.

 

[Inkbirdbbq]

Hey all, Inkbird 4 probe wireless therm for 50% off! Click & save coupon, I just picked one up for $25!

LOL. Did you see this promotion on Facebook group before?