What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol

PLEASE tell me you sent this message via smoke signals.

Convenience. You can start it and keep an eye on it without even having to go out to the grill.

When you want to intergrate your smoker into homeassitant so you can adjust it from the office.

It's a smoker, with a port for a temp probe in the meat.

When you smoke something for 10-12 hours it's nice to get temp readings from wherever. It might also have automatic control for temperature management.

It’s a smoker add on. I’d assume so you can adjust the temperature without actually opening it.

Pay me? Fuck yes, I'll rip that crap out and replace it with a couple of relays or maybe get fancy and arduino -> home assistant.

I'm betting that someone pay a LOT extra to get that garbage though.

Sending a temp updates to your phone so you don't have to be standing near it the whole time is a nice feature.

I will never need a wifi connected kitchen appliance. A grill fits that category. My grill is a disposable item I buy one every four or five years.

None of my go to devices are internet connected. Not my TV screens. Not my toothbrush. My daily driver is a 2009 Toyota. Its great. No screens and easy to fix.

I'm an IT guy, if my printer made a noise I don't recognise I'd shoot it.

I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It's a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.

No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I've had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.

Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.

As an IT nerd I got one of these and put it on a different subnet and it's not able to reach out to anything external but my phone can hit it from a different subnet. Thing works great.

Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)

I once wondered why the fuck an oven should need WiFi.

Then last week I was stuck in a traffic jam coming home from work, and took 2 hrs to do what should've been a 1 hr drive. (45km distance)

Then I had to make dinner, and I had such little time to have dinner, clean up from dinner, shower, walk the dog, and settle down for bed for work in the morning, I was angrily wishing I could preheat the oven while I was on my way home from work. That's when I realized the reason for a WiFi oven.

Also, being able to say "hey Google lights out" when I'm tired as fuck about to go to bed and the light switch is on the other side of the room opposite direction from the bedroom, is nice too.

Actually, as someone who has little free time when not stuck at work or in traffic, I'm probably more likely than the average person to appreciate things having wifi.

Doorknobs though, I'll draw the line there so we can both at least agree on something together

Connected HVAC can be pretty damn great depending on your house. It’s changed my energy usage a lot, and I like being able to adjust temps without walking downstairs in the middle of the night. Although having your thermostat lose cloud support ever 10-15 years is pretty shitty.

Connected doors are also great for handing out virtual keys and ensuring that stuff is shut and locked when you’re away.

Iirc, these grills are wifi connected so you can remotely monitor and control temperature. Makes sense if you are bbqing something that is gonna be in there for 12 hours. But then, you kind of lose one of the benefits of bbqing - sitting next to a grill and drinking beer with your friends for 12 hours.

Yes, and doors should be as simple as this

Jokes on you when they invent a new kind of meat your grill can’t cook

Are you live from your backyard where you're smoking meats?

Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe?

Then we're back to the same question. At what point a grill have anything that could be part of a botnet :D

If they are WiFi controlled that’s actually a good thing, as it sounds like the manufacturer is still supporting it & hopefully updating it to prevent security issues & hacks!

But this is also why I personally try not to buy WiFi enabled gadgets unless it really needs to be remotely accessible.

That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome

I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, "That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!"

We're starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors for the basement brewery) but it had to wait until i'd built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house

It's great for smoking though. I've done it the old fashioned way of staying up all night to feed wood into the smoker and I'll gladly take a wifi-enabled pellet smoker with a temperature probe over it.

This, but why does it need a firmware update and why couldn't it be setup to update on shutdown rather then power on?

It's very possible, dare I say preferred, to have a traditional Thanksgiving spread getting made in the kitchen while someone grills up some veggies.

My dad's gas grill doesn't do this either. Sometimes the boomer inability to understand technology is a blessing. Now if only he'd stop downloading sketchy slots games and getting viruses...

Fuck yes! Let 'em try to figure out how to require internet connectivity for lighting shit on fucking FIRE.🔥🖕🏻

With cooking normal beats all.

Gas, coal > electric shit

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.

I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!

So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.

Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.

Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.

Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.

Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.

After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”

pro tip

I get it. I hate it, but I get it.

another pro tip from someone else in IT: see that appliance with the digital screen? fuck it. don't get it. get the old shitty one that's $800 less that doesn't have WiFi or non-tactile buttons. you know what doesn't need firmware updates? a charcoal Weber grill.

Pro tip: don't buy a fucking BBQ that connects to the Internet.

No appliances in general while we're at it

Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.

Good shout on patch tues tho.

Thanks, but i prefer most utilities without wifi and need of patching. Each wifi device is running a full blown OS, for which the (cheapest possible) hardware will start to fail after 5 to 10 years. Experience from a wifi capable HP printer; wifi was the first that failed. Not to talk about never patched security holes.

Tuesday is the perfect day for it. Finish up the update on Friday, review it Monday and fix where you probably fucked up something and didn't notice, push it the next day.

I'm a casino slot tech. Don't even get me started on the electronic table games that still use a dealer! Like Scotty said, "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.".

To not connect it to the Internet would probably help and turn it into a normal grill.

The plot that kicks off Battlestar Galactica (2004) happens because pretty much everything uses wireless communications, including most systems within the space ships

I feel like hackers would always have been more believable than aliens.

You could hack a futuristic firmware upgradable power knife, but how do you hack it to hack off fingers?

Aliens had the supernatural power to be the machines

A self driving tesla trapping people in a gas station is 100% more believable than the semi.

Something is there...

Oh, so like Die Hard 4.

*Brought to you by Samsung.

A grill should run on charcoal.

Someone insert the KOTH reference, I'm too tired, I tell you hwat

Traeger makes pellet smokers. They have a hopper full of wood pellets and a micro controller that feeds in pellets to maintain a set temperature. You can get ones with a temperature probe to stick in the meat and let you know when it's done, which is what the Wi-Fi is for.

There's a legit use case for them because they save a ton of time and effort over smoking the traditional way.

While I agree that real charcoal is superior in every way, a good grill and the person running it needs to be able to control the temperature while cooking. It might be just fine to burn those hot dogs or hamburger patties, but if I want to roast a potato or an onion, I need to be able to control the heat to something less than the surface of the sun.

There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.

I really ought to finish putting together my HeaterMeter.

You're describing the gravity fed charcoal grills from masterbuilt and I love mine. Especially when I toss in a cast iron pan full of bacon and run it at 450 for half an hour.

ok but why aren't you outside with a beer..pretty sure that's a part of the meat smokers law

You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no

Additionally this way the smoker is basically invincible because it’s not digital and as long as you don’t let it rust out it will last forever. If you somehow break the thermometer it’s like $30 to replace but I guarantee you can find models that are somewhat repairable and have user replaceable batteries, which guarantee this thing doesn’t

BS. They update that expensive crap because it's full of security holes.

OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.

Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.

Keep it Low & Slow!

Looks like it is a crysis already.

Serious answer?

I have an app on my phone that allows me to control my pellet grill as long as it and my phone have an internet connection.

Doing a 12 hr smoke, I can leave the house and monitor it while I go shopping, change the temps if its not acting right. I can set temperature alerts and then go around the house and my phone goes off when the meat hits a certain internal temp. Its really really handy.

Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.

we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi

Thank you so much for that!😂