Ordered one a couple weeks ago (hoping to have better luck than the other posters, but..) and I’m thinking of hacking up a ruby app to monitor it from the web. (I want to learn ruby anyway..)

FYI there is an OSX management/monitor app over on this forum.

It finally did arrive last Thursday or Friday while I was at work. Saturday, the day I would have time to try it out……can’t use it! There is no power supply in the
box!!!!!!!

So I called and called and called. Of corse it’s closed on the weekend! But I call anyway and leave a message with the problem, my phone #,
cell # and my email address. No response! Tuesday I call again … no answer, leave another message.
Wednesday called again no answer leave a message: ” If I don’t get some kind of response I am going to pack the thing up and send it back”! … No response so far.

At this rate if I send it back I’ll probably be old and or dead before my credit ever shows up on my credit card!

Wow! What a way to run a business!

I have put off at least 4 family BBQ’s since ordering this blasted thing! Good Grief! I live in Montana, our summer is almost over!!

Should I wait or make funeral arrangements?

The TINI platform is quite neat. When I first got my Stoker, I portscanned it, figured out how to telnet to it (non-standard port) and, from the login query, found the TINI technical materials and used one of the various default logins to get in and have a poke around.

Neat little embedded system. So very high level in such a small package. Combined with the single-wire serial makes for a brilliant embedded controller.

-Jeremy

Well, I just got my Stoker yesterday and I fired it up last night. It works great. It’s making my first slow-cook (pork butt-ock) on a brand new Egg a stress-free experience, which is frankly worth the price of admission right there. I like the algorithm, how it learns to adjust to my cooker by observing the results of the air it injects. It got better and better and controlling the temp, adjusting when and how much air it provided, and last night I had no worries about sleeping while it worked. When I woke up this morning, the meat had gone from 40 degrees to 164.2 and the cooker was at 225.4 degrees (my target is 225).

I called Rock’s on Wednesday, and they were very helpful. I wanted it shipped next-day air and they said no problem. They provided a tracking number for me the next day and it arrived as scheduled, just a couple hours after my Big Green Egg was delivered.

Setup was easy, and as a techie and incurable gadget hacker I really like the whole design, software and hardware. I like the nice little perks like a built-in webserver, DHCP and NTP timesetting (on a temp controller? that’s off the hook!). Now I gotta learn how to program one of those TINI controllers! Chaos will ensue…

Let’s just say there was NO WAY I was not going to buy this thing. Web-enable a cooker with thousands of years of design heritage behind it? It must be done. That’s an ancient-modern mashup like Stargate and The Fifth Element. But I digress…

I’m going to set up a VPN at home so I can log in from work. I’m also writing a little perl script to fetch the status page, parse the HTML and give me an RSS feed. For you guys talking about a Mac OS X widget, I recommend using one of the many RSS widgets out there and do likewise. Besides, don’t despise screen-scraping: HTML, XML, tab-delimited, whatever. It’s all ASCII and whatever you do you’re gonna parse anyway. Good programmers are lazy, and I say easiest is best.

I wish it was more weather-proof, but as a gadgeteer I get why it isn’t. There was supposed to be some rain today, so I simply put a cover over the box and the connectors. No problemo.

But for all this tech talk, the Stoker is easy-to-use and requires no tech savvy whatsoever to set up and run. You don’t have to connect it to the network or anything. There just happens to be lots of little fun stuff in there for those of us who like to play around. And the fact that it can indeed control any number of cookers gets me thinking about bigger and better parties. I might buy a few el-cheapo grills that this thing has blower adapters for and get some serious parallel processing going.

I must say that Dan’s post below (from 8 months ago) is ridiculous. It’s completely irresponsible to suggest that someone is going out of business just because of an apparent lapse in communication with one customer. Heck, I wouldn’t return his emails either. Fax machine? Who uses a fax machine anymore anyway? As to violating Kalifornia law, Dan’s hot air must somehow violate their emissions rules.

I found Rock’s to be helpful and courteous, and their product is innovative and well-made. We need to encourage and support entrepreneurs that have small businesses and still manage crank out cool technology. It’s nice to see this stuff coming from someone other than Microsoft, Dell, HP or Cisco. Or Sharper Image (ugh). This is guerrilla gadgetry at it’s best, and I’m all for it.

Anyway, the butt is now at 183.5 degrees (target is 200) so we’re getting closer to suppertime.

- Bash

At first I used the Airport Admin utility and set the Airport Express to join my existing network like you would to have it stream music. With that scenario no IP address was assigned. Then I changed it to a WDS network. An IP address was assigned but when I use the IP address number in the manual it returns the error message “Safari could not open the page “http://192.168.0.2/” because the server stopped responding.”

Any help is appreciated.