Our customer, a manufacturer of automatically-controlled smoker grills, needed two things: tighter control on the cooking temperatures in their grills, and connectivity to allow their users to monitor and control their grills remotely, using their smart phones. We enabled both capabilities through a study of their previous design and an updated controller design with that connectivity built in.
We achieved precise temperature control over a variety of ambient conditions, testing our prototype design in both the heat of summer and the cold of winter. We enabled cloud connectivity and remote firmware updates for the grill through adding WiFi to the redesigned controller. The new controller has an LCD display, can operate customized cook cycles, notifies the user when more fuel must be added, and automatically restarts the fire if it senses the temperature is too low.