jdbower Posted January 3, 2009 Report Posted January 3, 2009 The BBQ Guru is a nice product, it's very clean, feature rich, and professional. The Stoker, on the other hand, reminds me of a college roommate's computer that was running in a Styrofoam cooler filled with mineral oil to keep it cool. The Stoker has two features that make it unique: 1. An Ethernet port 2. An open architecture With these two you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Using the buttons to program the Stoker works, but the web interface is much easier. Even better than the web interface is Amir's very popular StokerLog which gives you the ability to graph your cook and even send yourself emails periodically. For people interesting in rolling their own code, I found this site which gives a wealth of information including that it runs on the TINI platform, the root password is "tini", and this post listing how to get into logging mode from the telnet prompt (although the astute StokerLog observer can probably see these commands be executed). There's also the Stoker Timers program which also allows for email alerts and has other functionality that I have yet to fully explore. Anyone know of any other interesting tools? Anyone have any of their own home-grown utilities that they've written?
jdbower Posted June 29, 2009 Author Report Posted June 29, 2009 The current officially supported release of the Stoker firmware is available at Rock's BBQ website under support: http://rocksbarbque.com/downloads.html It's currently listed as 2.1.3 which was released in August of 2008. Since then Rock's made a few changes and Kaytat has been keeping up. While I wouldn't recommend updating the firmware unless you know what you're doing, they have been adding some neat features and I'm sure a ton of bug fixes. The latest is Twitter support, and the releases can be found here: http://www.kaytat.com/ Once a build migrates from Alpha/Beta to Releases it's a bit more happy to run, but if you like life on the edge go for it! Obligatory warning - firmware updates are often pretty scary and there's the chance you'll need to ship the unit back to Rock if something goes wrong.
