The Birth of pimometer

I don’t have too much to report on this yet, but I’ve been working on a Raspberry Pi project to monitor the status of a long BBQ or smoke out.  It’s under the current working title of pimometer.  Various design points are still being talked through, but I think we have the basics mostly understood or actually coded.

One night after a Dota 2 gaming session, DryGravyTrain (aka Gravy) and I started up a Scoot & Doodle session in our Google Hangout to talk through some of the design points.  It kinda got a bit into the brush after about 5 minutes.  Here was the product of our discussion:

You needn’t worry about all the details or subtleties.  It was late.  We were tired.  It just barely makes sense to even me.

A few more details

Now that we have the silliness out of the way, here are some of the current features we’d like to implement (or design goals we intend to hit):

• Work entirely in an offline mode
  • If an internet connection is unavailable, pimometer should still be entirely functional
  • If features do require an internet connection, they should recover gracefully after an outage
  • Self serving web interface
• Mobile and desktop support
  • We’re currently working on a web interface that works on both mobile and desktop
  • Would like to create a native Android app
• Cloud enabled
  • Currently working on a cloud based service for data storage/analysis
  • Considering leveraging other cloud services (Weather Underground, AllRecipes, etc.)
• Flexible data
  • Allow for as much or as little data as users may want to include (spices, altitude, additional sensors, etc.)
• Alert when the temperature is too high/low
  • Allow the user to set a high/low temperature to be alerted at (via a push service, hopefully)
  • Support changing the temperature during the smoking/bbq session
• Data analysis
  • Comparison of previous cooking sessions
  • Comparison to other users cooking sessions
  • Time/date/weather/proteins/etc.
• DIY or assembled kit
  • Offer an assembled kit for a good price (sub $100, hopefully)
  • Provide instructions for DIYers

I’m sure we’ll whittle this list down for a version 1.0 and make milestone for additional versions.

Hackathon

Gravy and I plan to have a mini hackathon soon.  We expect to be have a working product in a couple of weeks.  The most up-to-date information will be on the GitHub page.