Turkey Smoking

In our continuing efforts to engage in culinary experimentation and grill during the winter, we are trying to smoke a turkey today. Here's how it looked when we got started at 9:45am:

Smoking packet of hickory and apple chips on the left (yet to really start smoking) and the bird over a drip pan on the right. Only the burners on the left are lit so the heat will be entirely indirect. We're expecting it to take 8 hrs or so; stayed tuned for updated throughout the day.

UPDATE: Its 6:45pm (so much for updates throughout the day) and we've finished our smoked turkey dinner. Due to a later than expected start and emptying one of my propane tanks part-way through, we decided to finish the bird in the oven. It cooked there another 45 minutes; we were pretty close to being done on the grill. Outcome: the meat is drier but more flavorful. We're thinking next time only smoking for part of the day and finishing in the oven, hoping to preserve more of the moisture. I for one really enjoyed the smoked dark drumstick meat.

Richland Home Temperature Measurement:

In what is likely to be a moment of nerd weakness, I have started on the Richland version of the home temperature measurement system I had up and running in Wichita. (This is ignoring many, many other things that I have on my to-do list such as:

• Update/repair the digital picture frame (video driver is dead and I'm probably going to update to a Raspberry Pi 3)
• Finish the retaining wall in the back yard
• Debug the Lorenz project so I can take it into work with self-respect
• ...)

Due to the layout of this house, I'm not able to very easily implement this as a wired system and have been hunting around for good wireless options. I decided on using Low Power Lab's Moteino which uses the RFM69 radio. The radio has range should be more than sufficient to cover the range of my house and the Moteino can come with the radio installed and associated libraries make it easy to get the system up and running.

As I found out today: in less than fifteen minutes I had the sample system up and running with one node sending packets and the other receiving them (and acknowledging back to the sender the reception). With another thirty minutes of work I had the remote programming also working. This will be important as I plan on putting some of these nodes in hard-to-reach places and having the ability to wirelessly update their code will be important.

This was the hard part made easy. Now the hard part for me: start thinking through how this system is going to work and get my head around wireless communication paradigms.