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When Nerds Do BBQ
Rick Zeman writes: On this 4th of July, the day when Americans flock to their grills and smokers, Wired has a fascinating article on a computerized smoker designed by Harvard engineering students. They say, "In prototype form, the smoker looks like a combination of a giant pepper mill, a tandoori oven, and V.I.N.CENT from The Black Hole. It weighs 300 pounds. It has a refueling chute built into the side of it. And it uses a proportional-integral-derivative controller, a Raspberry Pi, and fans to regulate its own temperature, automatically producing an ideal slow-and-low burn."
After cooking >200 lbs of brisket while fine-tuning the design, the students concluded, "Old-school pitmasters are like, 'I cook mine in a garbage can,' and there's a point of pride in that. A lot of the cutting edge is when you take an art form and drag it back onto scientific turf and turn it into an algorithm. I don't think we've diluted the artistic component with this."
After cooking >200 lbs of brisket while fine-tuning the design, the students concluded, "Old-school pitmasters are like, 'I cook mine in a garbage can,' and there's a point of pride in that. A lot of the cutting edge is when you take an art form and drag it back onto scientific turf and turn it into an algorithm. I don't think we've diluted the artistic component with this."
Whomever it is, their begging the question to much
This.
Agreed.
Rediculous
“Mechanical engineers, it’s not a required class for them,” says bioengineering major Jordan DeGraaf. “There are no mechanical engineers who take this class. They just run away.”
This class is a ME for Non ME's. Everything in this project/class is what is the core of what ME is. Fluid Flow, Heat Transfer, Sensors, Controls, Materials, etc. I'm guessing the reason there are no ME's in it is because they are taking the real ME classes.
This is similar to when I was in school for ME but I had to take one EE class for non EE majors. There were no EE's in there not because it was hard but because it was easy.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Whoever's in charge of this guy, please lower his dose of Kool-Aid.
Thank you.
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Through lifelong dedication, a craftsman can align a car with a string, or smoke BBQ in a trash can, or whatever it is he or she does. But their activity doesn't scale beyond what they can personally produce. And if they end up smoking 100 pounds of meat per day to run their restaurant, that's it. There's little time left in the day to innovate. Craftsmen don't scale well, unless they industrialize their processes, (and then you risk ending up with a product with all the qualities of Budweiser.).
The rest of us are dedicated to other things: jobs, families, other hobbies. Does our inexperience mean we can't enjoy products of similar quality as the craftsmen produce? What's wrong with distilling the essence of their wisdom into a PID controller and an Atmel chip? If my BBQ-bot fails, I'm certainly not going to fix it with string - but that's not the point. The point is I could occasionally enjoy a high quality smoked brisket, thanks to a machine that knows more than I do about the process.
John
That's kind of how the old-school pitmasters look at rigs like this. It has a purpose, and it has value...but you won't get any respect for using one.
I don't want respect, I want brisket that isn't dried out like literally every bit of brisket I've had outside of Texas.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"