from Hacker News

Smoking a turkey with Prometheus, Home Assistant, and Grafana

by blockloop on 11/27/21, 5:24 PM with 71 comments

• by gorgoiler on 11/27/21, 9:53 PM

  Very nice, though with a 200lb ceramic bbq like the BGE — and with the caveat that your lid gasket isn’t shot — you can leave it ticking over at 300F for hours, unattended. Big poultry in particular is dead simple because the giant breasts mean they cook as slowly as the legs, unlike a chicken where the breast will overcook by the time the thighs are done. Take it off when it’s at 140F and let it sit for an hour. My food coma today is testament to my partners ability to pull this off.

  With a kamado, always fill the firebox up with lots of fuel and get the whole thing hot before use. This is the key to a long, controlled burn.

  Control system integration is much more useful if you have a cheap steel drum with crappy sealing and a sub optimally designed firebox. You cheap out on the grill and compensate for it with active control systems.

  Kind of like a trebuchet vs a sniper rifle. Upgrade your throwing rocks with ESP32 terminal guidance and you’ll be able to knock a guy off his horse just as good as the latter. Or something.

• by alsuren on 11/27/21, 10:40 PM

  We have a similar setup in our house, but with bluetooth, mqtt(homie) and influx feeding into grafana ( cloudbbq-homie, with mijia-homie and homie-influx for the non-meat-related bits ).

  I will have to tell my housemate about your setup - we have a bunch of 433mhz light switches hooked up to our system, but they're currently connected via an esp32 in a slightly ugly way. That usb dongle sounds like a much better solution to that problem.

  As an aside, we are also currently using OpenHAB to make the bridge to Google Assistant when we want to trigger actions. My housemate is currently in the process of ripping it out, and replacing it with something that he's working on in rust, using axum. I would give you a link, but I can't remember what is called, and GitHub is down.

• by andrew_ on 11/28/21, 1:21 AM

  Not directly related, but we did the SPATCHCOCK method this year with a 33lb bird following this video [1] and it was INCREDIBLE. Brined for a day of course. If you have access to a Traeger, I highly recommend it.

  [1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/CWi3zc1jG-d/

• by grogenaut on 11/27/21, 9:53 PM

  coworker at twitch uses a similar setup for factorio optimization: https://github.com/afex/graftorio

• by fierro on 11/27/21, 10:11 PM

  Reading about this home-assistant thing -- why do you need an OS dedicated to the "home automation" use case? Isn't home automation simply an application level use case? Hard for me to see why we'd want a new OS/kernel for this.

• by hvgk on 11/27/21, 6:50 PM

  This is really cool. I never even thought of using Prometheus and Grafana for other applications despite pretty much looking after the stack full time.

• by Atreiden on 11/27/21, 6:05 PM

  This is one of the best arguments for having a home automation platform that I've seen. I'm always worried about maintaining temps. Great stuff!

• by itsgrimetime on 11/27/21, 8:36 PM

  Would love to see more posts about OPs IoT setup

• by mberning on 11/27/21, 10:56 PM

  I just watch Malcolm Reed and get a bird the same size as his.

• by goodpoint on 11/27/21, 8:15 PM

  At first I thought it was a parody about overdesign and CV-driven development.

  This kind of feedback loop can be done in hardware without even an IC. Or an 8266 microcontroller (2 euros on aliexpress) if you really need WiFi.

• by mylons on 11/27/21, 6:51 PM

  very cool write up. i’ve become obsessed with smoking since the pandemic. i’d love to hear about your other automations you mention!

• by vernie on 11/27/21, 9:37 PM

  All that and no picture of the bird.

• by dylan604 on 11/27/21, 6:23 PM

  That TP20 looks like it was inspired by the LaCie hard drives. Same color silicon padding and everything.

• by david_allison on 11/27/21, 6:15 PM

  (off-topic): Could the link be fixed to point to: https://www.blockloop.io/smoking-a-turkey-with-prometheus-ho...

• by armchairhacker on 11/27/21, 7:05 PM

  > Smoking a turkey with node.js, Electron, and Hello World

  Run your 4673-dependency "webscale" Electron app for a few seconds until your computer overheats, and then use it to cook your turkey.

• by goldenkey on 11/27/21, 6:26 PM

  Do we really need to genocide turkeys every year to celebrate a pockmarked holiday?

  I'd say a thankful person would be eating something a bit more sustainable than a turkey that's been growth-pumped like a lab animal to epic proportions. Where's the thanks in needless slaughter of sentient beings?

  Are we so daft that we express our thanks for our fortunate circumstances by causing suffering of others?