All those shellfish are underwater insects. They are delicious though. It makes me wonder if eating crickets is really that bad.
I’m ok with people not liking them though. Maybe that will bring down the “market value”.
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Haven’t had the chance to introduce the kiddos to crawfish. But my ex was mildly traumatized amused by my mother telling her to pinch the tails and suck the heads…
Ahhh… Memories of skipping classes to drive from N La to SW La to pick up sacks upon sacks of crawfish, and the drive back, including stops to hose them down to keep them wet and cool. And the purge pools. My god, the purge pools… Imagine, if you will, an entire house of drunken fraternity guys, their dates and guests, and at least one kiddie pool of brine full of unhappy crawfish. For completeness, the theme for said party was always “Hurricane”, so we usually had bamboo and various structures assembled around the “property”, and we were all in our tropical best (Hawaiian shirts and shorts). Enough of us were from points south that we could ensure a reasonably accurate representation, and enough from less vulnerable locales that it was never an issue of “poor taste” (like that would have come into play, what with the good old boys from the Ark-La-Tex we had).
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Raised near Houston. I wasn’t born cajun, but sometimes I wish I was.
After Katrina, some Nawlin’s transplants opened up a cajun restaurant in the shopping center next to our neighborhood. Wife and I would walk over for meals quite often.
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I really love the ending scene to one of The Wire season endings. To celebrate landing the case, the whole squad went to the harbor of Baltimore and bought a mountain of crab. They got a table with paper table cloth, a huuuge pile of crab and a hammer each. Not very different from how our weekend dinner was 
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Did you have the boards made? Or are you going to breadboard it? If you had to order a few boards I would happily take one or two off your hands!
Damn peer pressure… now i have to dust off my smoker for this weekend. Now the decision is chuck roast or brisket…? Either come out really well.
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Did a pork but two weekends ago. In at 930pm on Saturday and out at 4pm Sunday. One of the best i have ever done. Bone pulled out completely clean with 2 fingers.
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Brisket. Like that’s a decision at all
I’m doing it the old fashioned way… breadboard.
I considered ordering some boards, but I hope to do some development work on this thing too, so I like the idea of being able to change things up. I guess, I really could have built a ‘stock’ one first and then breadboarded the dev build.
I also didn’t like how they designed the board as a pihat for the zero to be mounted under the board. To me that was silly because the hat is so much larger than the pi zero. The interconnect/hat board should be the main board with everything mounted on top. It makes it easier to mount in an enclosure that way.
My plan is to replace the resistors for the temp probes with digipots. I have different probes I want to use and some of them have different resistance. Someone on the discord mentioned using digipots and it got my brain working.
This is where I’m at so far on the stock build. The dongle is the time-to-flight sensor for mounting inside the hopper and measuring the amount of pellets left. My plan is to make the controller removable. I’m going to use a 6-pin Deutsch connector to go from the controller into the bottom of the hopper. I’m also going to add the same connector to the stock controller. I’ll have the connector dangle under the hopper so I can easily swap from the stock controller to this one if I need to. It’ll be easier than connecting/disconnecting half a dozen bosch connectors.
One thing to note when working inside the electronics area, both the AC fan and the auger gears are wide open. Need to make sure you have good wire management under there… Don’t ask me how I figured that out 
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Fun! Maybe I go the same route then. I have a Pit Boss Pro4 vertical and would like better control over it. I have even been looking at a way to keep the water pan topped off during a long smoke using silicone wire and a sensor with a pump and silicone tubing to replenish as needed.
Everytime I come in here it just amazes me all the stuff you guys build and do.
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I have the same smoker and love it. For the water pan havent realy looked but i hVe toyed with a fish tank topoff system…
nice!
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Went back out at lunch and wired up some actual temperature probes. I still need to calibrate mine as they don’t match any of the profiles already created, but all 4 probes read the same value. Holding one in my hand causes it to rise up.
So, that’s good.
left to do:
- wire up physical buttons
- wire up relays
- mount everything in enclosure
- install on smoker
I was thinking just a bare wire sensor made from some silicone wire and strapped to a silicone tube. Use the wire as a capacitive sensor to turn on and off a pond pump.
Not sure it is a huge deal as most of my long smokes I do overnight and run the temp at 200 so the water pan lasts.
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Even easier would be to just use gravity.
Fill a jug up with water and put a lid on it so it’s sealed. Have the tube run out a fitting/valve in the bottom of the jug and into your smoker so the opening is under the water level in the plate. Open the valve. When the water goes below the opening in the tube, air will go in and water will come out. Once the tube is under water again, it will stop flowing.
It’s the same way chicken waterer work.
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It’s what happens when the geeks and nerds grow up and realize they don’t have to wait for allowance or chores to spend money, nor do they have to justify what they’re spending their money on. And they realize that a bag of Funyuns and a bottle of Mt Dew isn’t really fine cuisine…
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Excuse me? Mt Dew tastes just as good out of a champagne glass as it does a plastic bottle.
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