Kiln Firing monitor - Going in the wrong direction

Tuesday 6th November 2018

So many glazes appear as they do because of the insight-live.com/glossary/226">firing schedule (especially the cooling curve). Imagine getting an awesome result out of a kiln and not knowing (or being able to replicate) the exact firing schedule that produced it. Or a bad result and being able to relate that to the firing schedule that actually occurred. This is not a kiln controller, it simply reads and records the temperature once per minute. It is a Raspberry Pi computer with camera that reads the temperature display on the kiln (using machine vision). This seemed like a good idea at the time, but adding all the difficulties of reading the display turned out not to be worth the trouble when it is so easy to connect a dedicated thermocouple. Further, the device is too capable. Being an entire Linux computer it would be a vector for hacker intrusion into the host wifi network unless being constantly updated (a large Las Vegas casino was hacked recently, the vector into their network was an iOT aquarium thermometer). While it can be programmed as an access point, hosting its own wifi network, this is too much trouble to use, people are not going to want to constantly change their wifi connection. More problems: Its complexity means there are too many things to go wrong, it uses too much power for battery operation and is a hassle to plug in. Most importantly, the computer knowledge required is well beyond the ability of the average person to navigate.

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Build a kiln monitoring device

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