No, but I’ve used the Pecan blends a few times. Even in my offset I start with Pecan, but switch to oak half way through. I get oak for free, but have to pay for Pecan. Plus Pecan burns faster than oak, so you go through more of it.
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I’ll look for a pecan blend. I know pit boss makes one, but my local wally worlds never have it in stock.
Well, the meatloaf was a big hit, one of my guests said it was “the best meatloaf she’d ever tasted”. 
I forgot to take pictures though… Nice smoke ring about ¼ inch deep, dense but juicy interior. I also smoked some yukon gold potatoes with a steak rub and they came out creamy but intense…
What recipe did you end up going with?
Try home depot and Lowe’s too.
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I went with the one you suggested, except for a bunch of changes. Correct meat mix instead of all beef, half again the volume (1# each of the three meats) which meant half again most of the other ingredients, slightly different spices mix, no sauce…
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I used
3 lb ground chuck
2 cup oat meal
4 eggs
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon Garlic
2 cups Celery
1/2 large yellow onion
Cook til onion clear and Celery is just to liking
Mix in large bowl turn onto cooking sheet in pan to catch drippings insert probe cook t o 165 -170 at 250 aprox 3-3.5 hrs
Meat mixes are fine I just grew up with this. Kind of like rabbit free stew 
Serves my family 
A trick to use with the onion, rather than sweating it in a saute pan, just put it into a food processor raw then puree it. Squeeze it in some cheese cloth and it won’t be adding moisture to the meat mix, yet still holds all it’s flavor. You might think about that also with the celery… For the oatmeal, pulsing it in a food processor or spice grinder will give you texture closer to the traditional bread crumbs. I also find that 165F is a bit high, it leaves the loaf somewhat dried out. Something closer to 140-150 gives a more tender loaf and you really don’t have to worry that much about the magic 165F killing all the bad critters. Since you are starting with ground meat you shouldn’t really go the ‘medium rare’ route of 132F, but medium well is plenty.
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Worked on my pellet smoker controller over the weekend. Got the temp probe working and made some relays click. Went to go setup wifi on the ESP32 and it wouldn’t connect. The Router showed it connected and an IP assigned, but the firmware never left ‘isconnected?’ state.
Finally too the same firmware and software and put them onto another ESP32 I had lying around and everything connected immediately.
Now it’s on to actually coming up with a logic loop for controlling everything.
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My wife has the notion if you can’t see it isn’t there so you have to see chunks of onion and Celery. And I use oatmeal because I like the texture and it is mostly a personal thing for me. I’m sorry to say I don’t have a food processor 
is the biggest reason 
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The heater meter project is open source so you could check that out for inspiration. It uses a pretty straight forward PID loop.
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Pid loops are fairly easy… I found one that looks like it’ll work pretty well. It’s coming up with the values that will take some testing. Luckily these are pretty under damped devices
I also have to account for the initial light up. The pit boss does this by steadily cycling the auger on and off with the igniter on. I plan on doing the same with mine. Once lit, the Pid loop will take over to send it up to temp.
There are also self tuning PID loops that can work reasonably well, but for this project, since the change to heat source (feed some pellets) is going to have a very slow response in temperature you are likely just as well off with some fuzzy logic… Otherwise you’ll have to have the Integral part of Proportional, Integral, Derivative very small.
I imagine a pellet grill responds much more quickly than an insulated komado grill the heater meter is tuned for… I wonder if you could get away with a simple hysteresis control?
(Edit) just read bill’s suggestion. I didn’t realize pellets are that slow to respond as well… Makes sense. I’m going to bed. Lol
Integrators are evil.
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My pellet grill holds a stable temperature pretty stable, but takes several minutes at best to get stable. When I first turn it on and it starts actually heating (5-15 minutes later) it should be controlling the pellet feed to meet the initial setting (150F) and my experience is it will overshoot by around 50F, then settle back down. I’m guessing they are running a P loop instead of PID, except it does end up settling at the actual set point, so there has to be some I in there.
Does it turn on and off? It could be a bang-bang.
It does turn on and off, but for the period needed to move a specific amount of pellet to the chamber. I believe it’s either using fuzzy logic and spinning for set periods of time or a PID that only runs it’s calc every so often. When I was first doing PID loops for environmental control in the early 90s I ran the loop every six seconds, and that was plenty fast for steam or hot water valves, controlling air temperature after the fan. I haven’t timed it at all, but I’d guess they are running it every ten seconds (or maybe 10.24 seconds :))
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I found an article that talked about the stock Pit Boss controller. When in the ‘P’ state, it’s purely by time. I think you’re right about the temp-controlled part of the controller only using P out of the PID. And with as slow as it is to change, it’s really all that’s needed. I can watch the graph of the pit temperature and it slowly oscillates a bit above and below the set point. Usually around a 5 degree difference once it settles.
My plan is to pretty much mimic this same setup. The only difference I plan on making is automating when the pit switches from ‘P’ mode to temp-controlled. Right now when I run my pit I run it up to about 300F. I let it sit there long enough to warm up the grates (10 minutes or so). Then I brush off the grates, put the meat on and set it to the smoke setting. Over then next 1-2 hours it slowly drops temperature as the smoke setting doesn’t monitor the pit temp. Once the pit gets down around 180 or so, then I set the temp at 250F for the rest of the cook.
My plan is to automate that start-up sequence. I’m going to have it light the pit, then run up to 300F. Then I’ll have a button on the app when I put the meat on to start the cook process.
I may even go so far as to put a meat probe on it. One of the things I like to do when cooking chicken is to bump the heat up to about 350F when the meat temp hits 145-150. Running the pit hotter for the last 10 minutes or so helps to crispy up the skin so it’s not rubbery.
Only proportional control won’t work (I could be wrong). But when the error is small or zero, it won’t do anything and it will need to be quite cool again to have an impact. I am guessing it loses a lot of heat in steady state and it needs to have some strong input to keep it at temp.
Bang bang would mean it would turn on as soon as the temperature dropped 2.5deg below the set point and be fully on until it reaches 2.5deg above the set point, then it would turn completely off.
Another possibility is feed forward. If you could guess that you need to be on 15% of the time if the temperature was 250F or 20% of the time if the temperature was 300F, then you could start with that value and then measure the error and add in a proportional input. The FF would decide 15% and the P might see it is cold and needs another 50% or too hot and needs to drop -5%. Then you add them up. It is sort of having a deterministic integral term.