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Charcoal Grill / Smoker Monitor


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Ok so this is my inaugural MSP430 project, i.e. the first legitimately useful thing I've built since buying a LaunchPad.   One of my bosses at work asked me, after I babbled on about my Arduino work

Finally, one project I've wanted to do since... oh, maybe 1 month after doing the grill monitor.  A hangable bright display for viewing the grill temperatures inside the house.   I decided to cons

Jeez, awesome! Add it to the POTM.

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Finally, one project I've wanted to do since... oh, maybe 1 month after doing the grill monitor.  A hangable bright display for viewing the grill temperatures inside the house.

post-15991-0-01483200-1387839650_thumb.jpg

 

I decided to construct this as a BoosterPack; I'm sort've warming up to the idea of using the BoosterPack format for final projects, just because I'm getting too lazy to work out the PCB layout details of each CPU etc.  Plus it's cheap to have a bunch of minimalistic launchpads constructed and mix & match them with boosterpacks along with being able to prototype with new MCUs.  The new BYOB BoosterPack standard layout helps me feel better about assigning pins too.

 

Anyway, this is not my POTM entry for this Nov-Jan as I have a cooler one I'm going to submit (along the same lines though).

 

Front:

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Back:

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Initialization screen:

post-15991-0-69303000-1387839642_thumb.jpg

 

Given their DIRT CHEAP price (<=$1.50/pc in qty), I am really becoming a huge fan of those Nokia 1202 LCDs.  I used straight C for this but my msprf24 library includes 9-bit SPI support just for this screen.  It's really a nice value and package.

Alas, it's just for my own debugging purposes.  I may repurpose it later to provide a graphical view of the temperatures over time, but for now it's just debugging messages.

Also @@RobG 's technique of wrapping the connector underneath... works extremely well and IMO was easier to solder!

 

The LED displays are those Oasis SPI LED displays found for pretty cheap, I think it was $9 for 10 of them?  Nice SPI-addressable displays.  Just happen to have a red colon in spite of green lettering, but I don't need the colon for this application.

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Awesome project! I think that every time that I talk to someone about imp.guru, the same topic comes up... I need that for my smoker.

 

Have you thought about pushing the temp data out to data.sparkfun.com as well?

I haven't ..... not sure what that gets me.  My current setup gets data posted to a webpage on my home server where I pull it from my phone.

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I haven't ..... not sure what that gets me. My current setup gets data posted to a webpage on my home server where I pull it from my phone.

Good point, I don't think that you would get much additional from doing it except that you could share the results with others or view the data outside of your LAN. Those reasons aren't too compelling though.

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Good point, I don't think that you would get much additional from doing it except that you could share the results with others or view the data outside of your LAN. Those reasons aren't too compelling though.

Oh yeah and my home server has a public IP & DNS, so I can check the data from outside the home too :D

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@@spirilis do you have an extra pin avaialbe on your MCU for an electrolyte detector? Would save on the battery holder cleanup... ;)

Hehe... I do have some GPIO's broken out to an "expansion" header but all go through an inline 1K resistor array. One thing I wish I'd included is an ADC pin going to the raw battery rail. The circuit uses a TPS61221 for its Vcc rail. (Routing on that was much better since I had plenty of space to work with btw ;) )

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