poor baby. who grills out on thanksgiving? also my charcoal grill never does this
My dad’s gas grill doesn’t do this either. Sometimes the boomer inability to understand technology is a blessing. Now if only he’d stop downloading sketchy slots games and getting viruses…
Sounds like the start of Cory Doctorow’s book Radicalized.
Now it can run Crysis
I have a Christmas tree with built-in LED lights where I can change their colors and make patterns and animations. Every year I get it out I have to do a firmware update on my Christmas tree before I can use it 😂
If they are WiFi controlled that’s actually a good thing, as it sounds like the manufacturer is still supporting it & hopefully updating it to prevent security issues & hacks!
But this is also why I personally try not to buy WiFi enabled gadgets unless it really needs to be remotely accessible.
Grill, Dehumidifier, Air con, Fridge, Dishwasher, Washing Machine, Lightbulbs, Ovens, Doorknob…
None of that should be smarter than “press button, get action”.
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 once wondered why the fuck an oven should need WiFi.
Then last week I was stuck in a traffic jam coming home from work, and took 2 hrs to do what should’ve been a 1 hr drive. (45km distance)
Then I had to make dinner, and I had such little time to have dinner, clean up from dinner, shower, walk the dog, and settle down for bed for work in the morning, I was angrily wishing I could preheat the oven while I was on my way home from work. That’s when I realized the reason for a WiFi oven.
Also, being able to say “hey Google lights out” when I’m tired as fuck about to go to bed and the light switch is on the other side of the room opposite direction from the bedroom, is nice too.
Actually, as someone who has little free time when not stuck at work or in traffic, I’m probably more likely than the average person to appreciate things having wifi.
Doorknobs though, I’ll draw the line there so we can both at least agree on something together
Or we could just have better wages and shorter work weeks.
Reliable public transportation that doesn’t cause or get stuck in traffic jams, also.
A lot harder to buy that at the store unfortunately.
Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe? What would work better though is never connecting it to a network or even better, just don’t make it smart for no dam reason, lol.
Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe?
Then we’re back to the same question. At what point a grill have anything that could be part of a botnet :D
Anything with a network connection (unfortunately).
Iirc, these grills are wifi connected so you can remotely monitor and control temperature. Makes sense if you are bbqing something that is gonna be in there for 12 hours. But then, you kind of lose one of the benefits of bbqing - sitting next to a grill and drinking beer with your friends for 12 hours.
For this you could have a timer on the thing you set when you start it up and can then walk away from. You don’t need the damn net to have a clock in the appliance.
Yes, and doors should be as simple as this
oh, wait…
I have a friend who’s really big in to smoking meats for hours and hours and days at a time. He loves this kind of thing because he can monitor the smoker without physically being in front of it.
I think he’s crazy af for involving the damned internet in it but I guess it is what it is when you’re “cooking” something for 9 hours.
I’m an IT nerd but they could not pay me to buy a grill that requires software updates. What a bunch of nonsense.
As an IT nerd I got one of these and put it on a different subnet and it’s not able to reach out to anything external but my phone can hit it from a different subnet. Thing works great.
I’m an IT guy, if my printer made a noise I don’t recognise I’d shoot it.
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.
Okay, I’m not a huge griller, but wouldn’t it be better just to build in a thermostat? Let it maintain its own temperature?
Sometimes you need cook on different temperatures at different periods. Sometimes you want to set it to cool down or heat up and instead of waiting near it, you could just set the target and let your phone ding when it’s time.
Commercial grills do exactly that. There’s just a thermostat built into the gas valve which uses a sensing bulb to modulate the gas flow based on actual temp and set temp. They don’t even need electricity let alone wifi.
It’s better to just purchase a temperature probe with wifi. Those are handy as hell.
I don’t think it’s better. It’s a different way to achieve that, but there is nothing inherently bad with whatever appliance that can do more than one thing. We shouldn’t expect the makers to be satisfied with the shitty job at programming damn things however.
I do want all my appliances to have wireless connection, I do want to talk to my kettle and set my oven temp on my phone.
My dad’s smoker is also able to set key frames so you can have it ramp up or down in temp at various points while cooking. And it can either be set to change temp at a time or when one of the probes reaches a certain temp. Plus he really likes being able to monitor it from his iPad, especially in the winter or if he has to run up to the store real quick.
I agree, but that should be a separate device. One that I can use in any grill or oven. There’s no reason for the grill itself to have that feature, especially if it can potentially brick the whole thing.
Sometimes I just need a device that can do what I want it to do. Obviously I don’t want a device that can be bricked, but that’s just a shitty programming, not a condemnation of the whole concept. I have a whole host of devices that never brick themselves, and I intend to get more.
Iirc, you can also control the temp, presumably by interacting with the pellet hopper or fan. This will be specific enough for a BBQ that an integrated component makes sense.
I will never need a wifi connected kitchen appliance. A grill fits that category. My grill is a disposable item I buy one every four or five years.
None of my go to devices are internet connected. Not my TV screens. Not my toothbrush. My daily driver is a 2009 Toyota. Its great. No screens and easy to fix.
Just out of curiosity… What are you doing to your grill that you need a new one every few years? Mine is prob. 10 years old and still no reason in sight to replace it.
They shoot at it when the food is subpar.
As someone in the PNW, there is not much you can do if you don’t bring the dang thing indoors that won’t leave the thing a pile of rust in 5 years.
I am trying with a specific form of stainless to see if it makes a difference.
I see, yes i also have a stainless steel one, which is outdoors all year. Good luck, i suspect you might have just solved your “grill consumption” :)
Have you tried ceramic? I don’t know if it makes sense but just a doubt
Someone will knock it over at some point within five years turning it into a sad jigsaw puzzle.
Nah, just give it the rattle can and paint it every now and then. “Once dor dust, twice for rust.”
I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It’s a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.
No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I’ve had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.
Gets up to 700 degs
That’s a furnace. Aluminium melts at 700 degrees. Gold at 1000.
I think they are using facism units
which minecraft mod is that?
Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.
Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)
The nosy kind. Seriously though, I’ll stick with my old obsolete brinkmann
But supposed they invented a whole new kind of meat and your grill wasn’t ready to deal with it? How would you feel then? Pretty darn silly, that’s how!
I love my charcoal grill
Fuck yes! Let 'em try to figure out how to require internet connectivity for lighting shit on fucking FIRE.🔥🖕🏻
With cooking normal beats all.
Gas, coal > electric shit
eh, induction stoves are nice.
Ovens?
It’s my oven and I’ll put my head in it if I want to
There was a silly little movie in the 80’s called “Maximum Overdrive”, written and directed by Stephen King.
In it Aliens somehow cause machines to ‘turn’ on human beings and attack us.
They could remake that movie now but instead of Aliens causing the machines to attack people, it could be malicious ‘hackers’ that do it, and it would be more believable that the original film.
The plot that kicks off Battlestar Galactica (2004) happens because pretty much everything uses wireless communications, including most systems within the space ships
Oh, so like Die Hard 4.
I feel like hackers would always have been more believable than aliens.
You can’t really (remotely) hack a machine that doesn’t have wireless capabilities or computer chips in them.
In the movie it was just regular, non electronic machines like (pre-computerized) diesel trucks and lawnmowers etc.
The original story was written before the Internet and so before hackers even existed. One of Stephen King’s cocaine fever dreams iirc.
Hackers predate the Internet. Phone phreaking, like the Captain Crunch whistle is basically the origin of hacking and hacker culture.
But your larger point is valid and there was probably more than a little cocaine involved with thinking up that story.
You could hack a futuristic firmware upgradable power knife, but how do you hack it to hack off fingers?
Aliens had the supernatural power to be the machines
A self driving tesla trapping people in a gas station is 100% more believable than the semi.
Something is there…
*Brought to you by Samsung.
when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.
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.
Why do you need wifi? You turn a knob and fill it with pellets every couple hours.
To get the temperature probe data on your phone so that you don’t have to repeatedly get up to check it. It’s particularly useful for turkey, where the difference between moist and horribly dry white meat is only 5-10 degrees.
I’ve got a Bluetooth temp probe set. They work a treat. And I totally forgot to even use them when I got smoked a salmon and chicken wings for Canada Day.
I’ve got a bluetooth temp probe set too. I use it in my smoker. I’m not trusting that expensive piece of meat to the whims of the gods. I need to know what the temperature of the meat is and when it hit’s the target temps.
TBF, I absolutely should have used them, but I was cooking for 25 people, and honestly totally forgot about them. I was rushing about with the BBQ, into the kitchen switching out cooked pizza for uncooked and trying to catch a sip of beer in between all that… As a result the salmon came out amazing, slow smoked at 60° for 3 hours because I totally forgot about it until the wife would occasionally say: the smoker’s not smoking!
Why not just buy a wifi probe instead of an entire grill? I’d rather a tiny thing stop working than being unable to use my grill at all because it’s jammed with too much tech.
Truly do they do anything else worth it? I’m a plain charcoal grill person, so never wanted or looked into anything beyond that.
All I can think of is reminders to fill the pellet bin. On balance I don’t think that’s worth it
