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Making Pulled Pork with React Native, Expo, and Express
- curiousgal 8y ago>Or: Taking a Picture Every 30 Seconds and Sending It To A Server.
- aphextron 8y agoWhen all you've got is a hammer...
- dceddia 8y agoReally just wanted to learn how to use the hammer, in this case. But still, yeah... you're not wrong ;)
- noveltyaccount 8y agoI was really looking forward to the part where you used servos to open and close the vents with a PID algorithm. Maybe v2 :)
- dceddia 8y agoThought about it... I've seen some people using a fan that they modulate with a PID to control the temp, which is on my list of "someday maybe" projects, heh. I wanna say there's even an existing product that does this, but I forget the name.
- jeremy7600 8y agoFlame Boss and CyberQ/PartyQ/DigiQ
- NoNotTheDuo 8y agoAnd PitmasterIQ
- jmhobbs 8y agoOpen source Go one called QPID on the Raspberry Pi, https://github.com/bbqgophers/qpid https://github.com/bbqgophers/qpid Fairly easy to glue together sensors to roll your own, I made an egg incubator with basically the same pieces that had a webcam too, http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-edition http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-... I like the reuse of the phone though, I wonder if there is some sort of bluetooth board out there that can bridge the phone to the gpio stuff.
- canadaj 8y agoNeat, I'm a huge fan of anything in the intersection of programming and bbq.
- jasonparallel 8y agoI'm a heater meter fan myself (with a combination blower damper) https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter
- dceddia 8y agoThis looks like an awesome level of overkill. Right up my alley. Maybe I'll build one of these next :)
- ASalazarMX 8y agoSorry, Bob. I can't make it to the BBQ event this year. My grill's CPU just died.
- mseebach 8y agoMeh. It's not real overkill if you don't have fail-over hardware.
- ASalazarMX 8y agoSuppose we could make it triple-redundant and call it "The Raman Grill".
- fhood 8y agoPressure cooker + liquid smoke. 9/10ths as good. Disclaimer: I say this as a firm believer in the power of charcoal.
- dceddia 8y agoInteresting. That sounds way faster and easier, I'll have to give that a try.
- lr4444lr 8y agoHow does pressure affect the time needed to break down collagen? The sweet spot temp. for most BBQ cooking is 225˚F, which is already above water's boiling point at standard pressure, so I'm unclear on how increased pressure would benefit cook time.
- CarVac 8y agoThat's the temperature outside the meat. The meat itself is kept cool by evaporation. Pressure cooking lets the internal temperature rise faster by suppressing the boiling on the surface.
- lr4444lr 8y agoslaps forehead Of course! It would totally demolish "the stall". I have a pellet grill, and I'd love it if it had a high pressure mode that would kick in, sealing off the vents, once the internal temp's rate of change slowed to a certain point.
- oh_sigh 8y agoCollagen breakdown is a kinetic process(that is, a function of temperature * time). So you can decrease the time if you increase the temperature, that gets you part of the way there. But then there is also the fact that in a BBQ smoker, you are getting almost 100% of your heat on meat from air convection, whereas in a pressure cooker your food is either submerged in liquid, or in a high pressure steam, meaning that the heat transfer is much, much higher in a pressure cooker(this is the same concept why exposing skin to 40 degree air is much more pleasant than dunking that same skin in 40 degree water). I haven't cooked pulled pork in a while, but I have been making some pulled chicken in my pressure cooker every now and then the past few months. After 15 minutes on high pressure(~15 psi, 250 degrees), the chicken is fully cooked and literally falling apart as I pick it up under its own weight, which is something I never get even when I smoke chicken in my digitally controlled electric BBQ. On a side note, I can get boneless skinless chicken thighs for $1.50/lbs, and cook up a big pile of delicious meat in 30 mins that lasts a week. Highly recommended for the cheap, lazy, or people who just like pulled chicken.
- monksy 8y agoAs long as this pulled pork doesn't include the use of Mustard I can approve this.
- dceddia 8y agoNo mustard. Sprayed with water before applying the rub. Added BBQ sauce sparingly to the final result. I must admit though, that I forgot to apply the rub before I put it on the smoker! (7am me was groggy, and rushing) So I applied it about 30 minutes into the cook. Surely not optimal, but it came out delicious anyway so hey, whatever :)
- jeremy7600 8y agoI've done very similar actions at 5 and 6am :D I would recommend rubbing with oil before the rub, and not water. Most seasonings are oil-soluble and will work better if you've oiled them first.
- electricslpnsld 8y agoVinegar is by far the best pulled pork preparation!
- jessaustin 8y ago(Bottled mustard is mostly vinegar.)
- workinthehead 8y agoNot really. It is true that many mustards utilize vinegar to slow the decomposition of the mustard, but it's not really the primary ingredient (perhaps by weight in some cases, but not culinarily). And being bottled has nothing to do with whether vinegar is used or not. But most importantly (and this should be obvious), it's not anything like a replacement for vinegar.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Alupis 8y agoThe takeaway piece at the end really hit-home for me: I think it’s important to work some fun into programming projects. Give yourself permission to build something that already exists, if only to learn how to build it yourself. It doesn’t have to be a big serious project, or a perfect portfolio piece. And on that note, don’t be afraid to hack things together. It’s a fun project! Write some terrible code that you know is terrible. Don’t stress so much about perfect abstractions and Best Practices and feeling like you have to incorporate every new library and tool. It’ll be fine. You can always refactor it when you write the blog post ;) I can't even count the number of similar, fun projects I've started... but which turned into stress centers that felt more like chores than leisure, causing them to never be completed. Often I end up worrying about the "best" way to do something or start planning for when the project is huge and needs to be well formed; paralyzed before I even get the code working.
- dceddia 8y agoDamn, yeah. Same here. That little voice of "is this really the BEST way" has grown stronger and stronger over the years, and I kinda have to fight it back to "allow" myself to do little hacky projects like this. I always wanted to be better at software engineering, and software design, and getting abstractions right, and all that stuff. I've slowly gotten better at all that, but I didn't know it would come with the tradeoff of being unable to switch it off.
- luigi23 8y agoProbably thats why many programmers have many great ideas but fails to come into reality. They cannot gain any fun from side project since they automatically want to ‘learn’ new framework, language, etc. Instead of messing around and looking how their idea grows into something fun. Its about having fun from creating, not from learning the proper way since beginning. Its clear when you tell your friends about your new idea - they would say ‘oh thats sounds cool!’, but when I tell the same to my programming friends I would rather hear ‘you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem, so it doesnt make sense’
- davidw 8y agoBesides a thermometer that can be read remotely, if you've got the money, a pellet smoker seems like the way to go: the heat and smoke come from actual wood being burned, but you can set the temperature and let it keep it there.
- lr4444lr 8y agoI have one. I like it a lot. I don't think they can hit quite the quality as a manual charcoal / wood vertical smoker except possibly at brands the higher end (above $2000, mine cost about 1/4 of that), especially if you like a deep rich smoke flavor, but for the convenience you get for the ease of use if you don't have the time to hone your pit skills (not to say a pellet grill doesn't have its own learning curve), I think it's worth the trade-off. Also, they are electro-mechanical devices kept in the outdoors and prone to the malfunction that you'd expect if not carefully maintained. Good companies have strong warranties, but some don't.
- darkstar999 8y agoYeah but what's the fun in that?
- BrentOzar 8y agoGiven the hype with AI, I was seriously expecting a section of this to be taking pictures of the pork itself, and then using machine learning to figure out whether to turn the heat up or down. So, just in case you're feeling guilty for over-engineering this, it could have been WAY worse, hahaha. This is the just-right level of overengineering.
- dceddia 8y agoI considered, for a very short while, trying to do some sort of OCR on the image to pull out the thermometer temperature and graph it over time. But that seemed a bit crazy. My first thought was https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/.
- davidkuhta 8y agoNeat project, but thanks for making me hungry in the afternoon :P +1 for OP's thermometer manufacturer Thermoworks, I'm a happy customer as well (and unaffiliated). As an aside, if you're in the market for an electronic temperature measurement device, they're currently running a Father's Day Sale. (https://www.thermoworks.com/ https://www.thermoworks.com/)
- dceddia 8y agoThermoworks is great. I think my first experience with them was their Thermapen product. It's awesome for checking internal temperatures damn near instantly.
- boomskats 8y agoFor years I've been wanting to write something that lets me use a cheapo webcam to plot timeseries temperature data from cheap (ie. non broadcasting) thermometers and thermocouples, something like the Chris' Coffee E61 grouphead digital thermometer[1] I have attached to my espresso machine. Like you I was also keen to automate my WSM smoker, and ended up buying a £20 Inkbird PID controller[2], hanging the thermocouple off the lid and hooking the 12v relay output directly to an old case fan attached via ducting to one of the vents. For I now get temperature stability to +/- 3 degrees C, and fuel that used to last 3 hours now lasts 11! My 2c aside, I really enjoyed reading your writeup, and I wouldn't have stuck with it and learnt as much had your chosen subject not been so close to my heart. [1]https://www.chriscoffee.com/e61-digital-thermometer-adapter-p/sss-04.htm https://www.chriscoffee.com/e61-digital-thermometer-adapter-... [2]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inkbird-Temperature-Controller-Thermostat-Thermocouple/dp/B00ADEJVXK/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inkbird-Temperature-Controller-Ther...
- antsar 8y agoIn case you haven’t already found it, ssocr may prove useful. https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/ssocr/ https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/ssocr/
- dceddia 8y agoThanks! Glad you enjoyed it. Your project sounds great, I've toyed with the idea of adding a PID/fan to this smoker somehow. The ones I had seen (from looking into adding a PID to a Rancilio Silvia) seemed awfully expensive, but hey, £20 ain't bad. I might just try this ;) Another application I want to apply a PID to is coffee roasting, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. EDIT: Oh wow, this one is only $16! https://www.amazon.com/Inkbird-All-Purpose-Temperature-Controller-Fahrenheit/dp/B00OXPE8U6 https://www.amazon.com/Inkbird-All-Purpose-Temperature-Contr... EDIT 2: Based on a review, it sounds like that $16 one won't measure temperatures above 210F. Bummer.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- emilfihlman 8y agoI couldn't tell if Pulled Pork referred to actual pulled pork or, as I assumed, to some new framework.
- saalweachter 8y agoI was really, really relieved that it was, in fact, pulled pork. There are only so many namespace collisions I can deal with; that isn't one of them.
- logfromblammo 8y agoFor vegans and other vegetarians, it is possible to prepare green jackfruit into a reasonable approximation of pulled pork. Most people use liquid smoke, but if you can use the nerdified grill process to perfectly smoke your jackfruit with actual smoke, so much the better.
- ljm 8y agoI have to admit that my first thought upon reading the title was that this was some satirical piece about the way some people announce or describe their software. "Doohickey - CLI app written in C++, Boost, and the STL" "whatchamacallit - an admin module written in JS, React, React Saga, Storyboard, Redux, Express, nginx, Electron and markdown" "mugabe-rails - a library written in Ruby to parse JSON" "lasagne - a meal made using cow, spaghetti, and tomato" Instead, what I took away from it was something much more insightful and mature. He pretty much defined his most minimal MVP, committed to getting that working, and completely dispensed with the notion that he had to invest in the more fancy tech up front. He got a working solution for his problem and if needs be, it can be made fancier now it actually works for him.
- dceddia 8y agoHah, thanks! I had a tough time coming up with a title for this. The pulled pork was the star of the story, and this project wouldn't have existed without it, so I went with that in the title. I tried to come up with something more generic but it was tough.
- fishbone 8y agoDave, you should get a Weber Smoky Mountain instead of a Kettle and then you won't need React Native. :-) Nice article, thanks for sharing!
- hoistbypetard 8y agoNice. Though I have to say, my favorite pulled pork hack involves C, PHP, an Arduino, a Pi, a couple of thermocouples, and a fan controlled by a solid state relay[1]. [1] https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter/wiki https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter/wiki Yours is simpler, and the photo part is really nice. But the fan control on the heatermeter project adds a whole other dimension.
- ksrm 8y agoWhy would such a simple app crash?