School Smoker Project Help

[lgs162]

Hi guys,

For my 3rd year Electrical Engineering design project I am building a custom electric meat smoker.  What I want it to be is PID controlled with 2 internal temperature probes, 4 meat temperature probes, a 1500 Watt element, and a wood weight monitoring station.  All of this data will be relayed to your smartphone where you can monitor everything in time vs temperature graphs, and control the temperature using your smartphone. For now we are just going to be using an old steel fridge for the smoker. When I am done I will be posting this to instructables for anyone to build.

For our design we are required to have "customers" to interview to ensure our design is meeting your needs.  I was hoping you guys could tell me any additional features or specs that you would want the smoker to have and we will ensure that it meets them.  This can be operating temperature range, amount of temperature probes, operating range of wireless, cost, etc.  Please leave no stone unturned for ideas as you will all have access to the plans eventually.

Thank you very much and I look forward to your replies.

 

[fwismoker]

I would love to see the end result with instructions.   Is there any way to put in a camera to peek at the food via your smart phone?  If you could that would be awesome because you wouldn't have to worry about opening it up and letting out heat. 

 

[lgs162]

I think the smoke inside would make that very difficult.  Will make a note of that.  We were hoping that the graph of the four meat thermometer probe temperatures vs time graph would be enough detail to make exact duplicate recipes next time.  Since the data is sent to your smartphone you would not have to open the door either.

 

[fwismoker]

If you click on my smoker pictures  you'll see i have propane firing it...it has a turkey fryer burner in the bottom of the stove.  Eventually i'd like to figure out a way to have a pilot lite ran to the burner and hook up an PID to control the gas.   It stays pretty steady now  but thinking about taking it to the next level so to speak.

 

[lgs162]

I was talking to my friend who was a plumber and if yours is already pretty steady then what you want to do is hook a control to the vent so you can control the amount of oxygen entering it using the PID.   He said that is a pretty good way of controlling the flame from gas or wood burning.

 

[fwismoker]

I have something called a "partyq" that i attach to the stove for when i'm using charcoal to do what you described.  There is a tube adapter bolted on the stove for when i want to use it. It's pretty much a PID controller but set up and ready to go with a thermocouple that runs to the pit, it adjust the air going to the charcoal.  In the colder months the propane is so much easier to deal, i'll probably go back to charcoal in the summer.