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?

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

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

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.

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; use electronics that are stable and user focused.

Good shout on patch tues tho.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.".