An open source Elixir application to control Flame Boss and white labeled Flame Boss controllers like the Egg Genius.
Ever try to cook on a major holiday like Thanksgiving in the US and discover that your cloud-connected BBQ controller isn't working very well? Things like network disconnects, severely delayed notifications, inability to control the temperature settings, and so on? Me too.
This happens because FlameBoss' cloud services are overwhelmed with the number of simultaneous users. Cloud services cost money (a shocking amount of it), and these controllers do not require a paid subscription (Yay! Much love for this choice!), but that also means that FlameBoss has to pay for the cloud services through equipment sales (why your device costs so much), and potentially through selling information collected from their users (Boooooo! I hope not.).
The fine product and engineering teams at Flame Boss clearly knew this could be a problem and wanted their customers to have an alternative. In the Big Green Egg iOS app, this is "local" and "direct" mode. Those modes have limited functionality compared to "cloud" mode, but they do allow you to control your device.
Open Boss uses direct mode, and provides (or will eventually...) the features missing from cloud mode. It does this 100% locally and never needs an internet connection. If you want timestamps to be accurate, you probably want internet for that...but Open Boss will work just fine without it.
- Discovery of Flame Boss devices on the local network via mDNS
- Basic control of Egg Genius, maybe others like the Flame Boss 400
- Cook tracking and history
OpenBoss works by running software on the same network as the Flame Boss device(s), discovering them using mDNS, and connecting to each using MQTT. Internet connectivity is not required. OpenBoss presents a web-based interface to control the devices, manage "cooks" (a session of cooking food, not a group of people cooking things in a kitchen), and provide feedback regarding cooking progress. It is lightweight, requiring very little CPU and typically < 100MB of memory, making Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone viable host platforms. It should run on any system capable of running Erlang.