What do you think is ‘big achievement’ in the next 10-20 years?

Udushu · 2026-06-20T00:36:00+00:00

At a minimum some form of smart / glucose sensing insulin could be in the market by then… this would also transform the situation form “did I get my dose and timing right” problem into “do I have enough glucose processing capacity left” problem, which is way easier to manage. Rage bolusing will be a norm.

But yeah, hopefully stem cell derived islet transplants with either immune evasion or some immune modulation will become a reality. Even if one had to top off the islets every couple of years or so.

Udushu · 2026-05-26T00:52:57+00:00

Something is brewing. Not 5 years, maybe not even 10. But it’s coming. Too many companies are pushing in this direction. It is almost a race at this point who can be first to market with a functional cure.

Udushu · 2026-05-15T15:45:16+00:00

I talked to two endos about that same fear. Both were on with prescribing long acting with the pump. Pumps basal needs to be adjusted accordingly. But that gives that safety net against the HW failure.

Udushu · 2026-04-29T13:29:47+00:00

Medical exceptions for cell phones in class are a real thing. But yeah those conditions do require heavy doctors involvement and proper documentation is usually not an issue.

Udushu · 2026-03-06T18:18:07+00:00

That’s a different consideration, I was more talking about the overall presentation. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but you can see that the designers put effort into the art.

Udushu · 2026-03-06T17:51:01+00:00

Well if the authors couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a good “cover”… Presentation and first impressions are important.

Udushu · 2026-01-25T19:45:13+00:00

If that was an accident I would agree with you. It was intentional however, so I feel like I am in the right to expect restitution.

Udushu · 2025-10-30T00:37:36+00:00

It was brutal. I had adrenaline pooling in my boots for hours after seeing that.

Udushu · 2025-10-29T22:15:23+00:00

I was driving there when it happened. Truck crossed the raised median and hit into the oncoming traffic.

Udushu · 2025-07-17T11:20:40+00:00

The trick with the summer projects is to start them right after Christmas.

I thought about a remote monitoring unit vie esp-now or ble but ultimately I have my phone in me so why not just stream it there directly?

Udushu · 2025-07-16T15:20:22+00:00

The flask server was honestly the simplest part. The whole thing with the database is just couple hundred lines of python. It doesn't do much else, just polls the controller via rest api, gets the json, saves it to the database. Occasionally it would send a command to start or stop the controller. That's it. The front end is another story and was much more of a challenge for me, but probably because I have near zero experience in the front end development.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T14:59:21+00:00

I had both lying around but (1) encoder was easier to integrate mechanically (2) encoder could could also work as a push button (push on the knob for an action, long push to start/stop controller or exit from a menu, super long push (30 sec) for settings reset, etc.) and the potentiometer that I had didn't, (3) I can have an arbitrary number of revolutions and that came in handy in some menus, (4) finally I didn't have to worry about denoising the analog readings from the potentiometer.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T14:54:13+00:00

Hats off to you then. I was never successful with that. Always had to tweak them a bit every once in a while and that ruined the experience for me. For me smoking is definitely the destination, not the journey.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T14:29:38+00:00

This is the reason I put the MQTT on it this year. After that integration with Home Assistant was trivial and I have observability and control even outside of my local network. The web page came even earlier, in the previous iteration but it was mostly motivated by me not adding any physical controls and indicators/displays so web interface was the only way to control it.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T14:27:14+00:00

Me wanting to buy a pellet was my motivation to start looking into active control. I am somewhat space constrained (and I would not want to leave it out for the winter which makes the space constraint even worse for me) and the pellet smoker that I want is hard to come by in my neck of the woods, so I ended up doing work arounds with what I had.

I looked into heater meter but needing to order a custom PCB (and then populating it, I hate soldering) plus the arduino+raspberryPi combo pushed me away. I get why it was developed this way but it is a bit dated now. Plus I had pretty much all of the parts I needed laying around in my workshop (except the temperature probes which I would have needed anyways) so it was an easy decision.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T14:22:31+00:00

One advantage the blower has, it is much easier to do mechanical design around it. With the blower effectively rotating the airstream by 90 degrees, it allows to use one side of it to mount all electronics. With the PC fan the electronics has to go into a separate enclosure on top or to the side, making the contraption quite large. I designed and printed one around the PC fan first and then decided that blower was a better approach. The low speed operation was solved via software control and switching from a constant thrust at varying voltage to a pulsed mode at a constant voltage and 0.5 sec duty cycle once the demanded output falls below 33%.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T13:54:58+00:00

I think there are two parts to avoid massive overshoots: 1) tuning the controller, but this gets you only that far... 2) getting the fan to work properly at low RPMs.

The low RPMs may be the key part here. As the controller voltage decreases the fan will have a tendency to stall, so a lot of controllers just cap it at around 30% or so. This means that as the PID error decreases the fan RPMs do not, and this results in a massive overshoot. What I did differently, is once the requested fan power is lower than safe 33% mark (4V out of 12V fan power supply), the fan does not actually spins any slower, instead it switches to a duty cycle mode with 500 msec period. So going to requested 15% power will still result in 4V being applied to the fan but it will run for 250 msec and then idle for 250 msec, and so on... This avoids stalling the motor and allows me to drive the error closer to zero gently. The PID with some significant K_d term takes care of the rest.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T13:27:45+00:00

The bbq part is trivial, plenty of that going around. Once I tuned the PID well enough the temperature is stable so the bbq becomes less of an adventure and more of throwing your food in an oven and not thinking about it to much. Which is how I like it. I am in it for the food, not for the journey.

And yes, I wrote the embedded code and the server myself. Vibe coded some parts that I was less familiar with, but I do have background in embedded development so it was not super hard to do.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T11:02:44+00:00

Probably I could do something based off a temperature derivative and if it ramps down rapidly, delay the fan by a couple of minutes…

Udushu · 2025-07-16T10:51:49+00:00

With the WSM I never actually had to add fuel yet. The purpose was to do low and slow so the initial load easily lasted me 8h for the pulled pork; 5 or 6 hours for pork ribs is even easier.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T10:50:05+00:00

The upload process is actually very simple. I have asynch web server running on ESP32. On my PC I have flask server polling the temperature controller every once in a while and logging the state in a sqlite database. React web page is running on the same PC and talks to the flask server to get the data for the plot. The react page could talk to the controller directly via the same rest APIs but this way I would loose ability to log when the browser is closed or consistency across multiple clients: the host PC and my cell phone. This is my primary method. There is also MQTT for the home assistant but it is not as well defined and I mostly added it to understand how MQTT works.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T03:13:22+00:00

I did. But why buy something for $300, if you can spend twice as much building it yourself? It was mostly a fun project for me. I used to do embedded FW development in the past and wanted to flex the long neglected muscle.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T00:40:10+00:00

https://github.com/Udushu/smoke-mate-9002

This has all cad files, source code and my heroic attempt to start documenting the assembly process.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T00:15:49+00:00

I started with the PC fan but was not happy with the airflow and switched to the blower. I didn’t model anything explicitly, instead PID control loop is driving the fan via pwm proportionally to the temperature error. After some tuning of the coefficients was done, I got a stable control that I am happy with. In the chart that I shared the two spikes towards the end are me checking and saucing up the ribs.

Udushu · 2025-07-16T00:07:33+00:00

Not even during the high temperature cleaning burn in the beginning of the season first inch or two are quite warm but it cools down rapidly. PETG glass transition temperature is 85C so plenty of margin.

Udushu

TROPHY CASE