What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol

I have a Traeger and saved $200 because it was the model without WiFi.

I made a delicious turkey breast on Independence Day

Jokes on you when they invent a new kind of meat your grill can’t cook
- DRM Ribs. The Salmonella will not die until you pay for Traeger's $19 a month subscription
- It can do bread and the best tasting broccoli and Brussels sprouts you’ve ever had
- raw shrimp on a grill staying completely uncooked next to grilled chicken and steak because you don't have the DRM for SeaPak©️ shrimp (photorealistic, art station, comedy, vivid)
Are you live from your backyard where you're smoking meats?
- Nah, I’ve got a Bluetooth thermometer so I can track it while I play video games
- 🎵. meat like a brisket. 🎶

I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.

That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
- Oh shit, I didn't know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
- At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, "That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!"
- Perform Bad Apple using the most complex geometric shapes possible.
We're starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors for the basement brewery) but it had to wait until i'd built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house

What are the chances they shipped it on Thanksgiving vs Thanksgiving being the first time in a while the user turned it on?

This, but why does it need a firmware update and why couldn't it be setup to update on shutdown rather then power on?
- Why does it have firmware?

I'm an IT nerd but they could not pay me to buy a grill that requires software updates. What a bunch of nonsense.

Pay me? Fuck yes, I'll rip that crap out and replace it with a couple of relays or maybe get fancy and arduino -> home assistant.
I'm betting that someone pay a LOT extra to get that garbage though.
Sending a temp updates to your phone so you don't have to be standing near it the whole time is a nice feature.
- My dad's smoker is also able to set key frames so you can have it ramp up or down in temp at various points while cooking. And it can either be set to change temp at a time or when one of the probes reaches a certain temp. Plus he really likes being able to monitor it from his iPad, especially in the winter or if he has to run up to the store real quick.
- Okay, I'm not a huge griller, but wouldn't it be better just to build in a thermostat? Let it maintain its own temperature?
- It’s better to just purchase a temperature probe with wifi. Those are handy as hell.
- I agree, but that should be a separate device. One that I can use in any grill or oven. There's no reason for the grill itself to have that feature, especially if it can potentially brick the whole thing.
I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It's a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.
No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I've had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.
- which minecraft mod is that?
Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.
Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)
As an IT nerd I got one of these and put it on a different subnet and it's not able to reach out to anything external but my phone can hit it from a different subnet. Thing works great.

It's a smoker with wireless controls

Instead of having to keep checking on it for several hours, an app on your phone will show the temperature and allow temperature adjustments online

You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no
Additionally this way the smoker is basically invincible because it’s not digital and as long as you don’t let it rust out it will last forever. If you somehow break the thermometer it’s like $30 to replace but I guarantee you can find models that are somewhat repairable and have user replaceable batteries, which guarantee this thing doesn’t
- Just waiting for the day an evil hacker leaks someone's smoker data to the neighborhood, exposing they cranked the smoker to 375° when they bragged about their brisket cooking 225° the whole time.
- The perfect brisket heist.
- You make some good points.
  I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It's really nice to monitor and change the temp while I'm drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I'm free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It's really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
BS. They update that expensive crap because it's full of security holes.
Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.
Keep it Low & Slow!

I guarantee this update didn't drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn't turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. "Patching Tuesday" is an unofficial but well recognized "holiday" for IT folks. It's not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don't have to work through the weekend.

Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it'll pop up on Tuesdays.

pro tip
I get it. I hate it, but I get it.
another pro tip from someone else in IT: see that appliance with the digital screen? fuck it. don't get it. get the old shitty one that's $800 less that doesn't have WiFi or non-tactile buttons. you know what doesn't need firmware updates? a charcoal Weber grill.
Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.
I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!
So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.
Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.
Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.
Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.
Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.
After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”
Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.
Good shout on patch tues tho.
Thanks, but i prefer most utilities without wifi and need of patching. Each wifi device is running a full blown OS, for which the (cheapest possible) hardware will start to fail after 5 to 10 years. Experience from a wifi capable HP printer; wifi was the first that failed. Not to talk about never patched security holes.
Tuesday is the perfect day for it. Finish up the update on Friday, review it Monday and fix where you probably fucked up something and didn't notice, push it the next day.

when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.

It's great for smoking though. I've done it the old fashioned way of staying up all night to feed wood into the smoker and I'll gladly take a wifi-enabled pellet smoker with a temperature probe over it.
- Why do you need wifi? You turn a knob and fill it with pellets every couple hours.

...The sort of grill I will never buy.

I like my home automation tech but it needs to serve a purpose. Just being connected to wifi is not a selling point for me. Lights that turn on in the morning when I need to wake up are great. A thermostat that can reduce energy usage when nobody is home is also great. But a grill….what the fuck does Internet access do to improve the grilling experience?

And if it requires the cloud to work, I don’t consider it a functional product.

Serious answer?
I have an app on my phone that allows me to control my pellet grill as long as it and my phone have an internet connection.
Doing a 12 hr smoke, I can leave the house and monitor it while I go shopping, change the temps if its not acting right. I can set temperature alerts and then go around the house and my phone goes off when the meat hits a certain internal temp. Its really really handy.
Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
- Matter is fine too. It’s off the cloud. MQTT is great but generally not exposed directly to the consumer.

Grill, Dehumidifier, Air con, Fridge, Dishwasher, Washing Machine, Lightbulbs, Ovens, Doorknob…

None of that should be smarter than "press button, get action".

Connected HVAC can be pretty damn great depending on your house. It’s changed my energy usage a lot, and I like being able to adjust temps without walking downstairs in the middle of the night. Although having your thermostat lose cloud support ever 10-15 years is pretty shitty.
Connected doors are also great for handing out virtual keys and ensuring that stuff is shut and locked when you’re away.
- I'm warry of electronic, wireless, and sometimes third-party cloud dependent services, having a say in how I lock my doors or control heating.
  I'm a bit old fashioned, but also have to work with solutions where considering the consequences of a compromised entry point is vital. I'd be ok with a way to check that the door is locked, but something that can lock (and, so, unlock) my door remotely? Not a chance. At least, not for a place a value.
- The Honeywell thermostats support z-wave. So no cloud shenanigans.

Yes, and doors should be as simple as this

oh, wait...

Imagine a grill without the latest firewall

Thank you so much for that!😂

Can we go back to dumb tech?

I'm a casino slot tech. Don't even get me started on the electronic table games that still use a dealer! Like Scotty said, "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.".
To not connect it to the Internet would probably help and turn it into a normal grill.

I have a friend who's really big in to smoking meats for hours and hours and days at a time. He loves this kind of thing because he can monitor the smoker without physically being in front of it.

I think he's crazy af for involving the damned internet in it but I guess it is what it is when you're "cooking" something for 9 hours.

Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe? What would work better though is never connecting it to a network or even better, just don't make it smart for no dam reason, lol.

Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe?
Then we're back to the same question. At what point a grill have anything that could be part of a botnet :D
- Anything with a network connection (unfortunately).

I love my charcoal grill

With cooking normal beats all.
Gas, coal > electric shit
- eh, induction stoves are nice.
- Ovens?

There was a silly little movie in the 80's called "Maximum Overdrive", written and directed by Stephen King.

In it Aliens somehow cause machines to 'turn' on human beings and attack us.

They could remake that movie now but instead of Aliens causing the machines to attack people, it could be malicious 'hackers' that do it, and it would be more believable that the original film.

The plot that kicks off Battlestar Galactica (2004) happens because pretty much everything uses wireless communications, including most systems within the space ships
I feel like hackers would always have been more believable than aliens.
- The original story was written before the Internet and so before hackers even existed. One of Stephen King's cocaine fever dreams iirc.
- You can't really (remotely) hack a machine that doesn't have wireless capabilities or computer chips in them.
  In the movie it was just regular, non electronic machines like (pre-computerized) diesel trucks and lawnmowers etc.
You could hack a futuristic firmware upgradable power knife, but how do you hack it to hack off fingers?
Aliens had the supernatural power to be the machines
A self driving tesla trapping people in a gas station is 100% more believable than the semi.
Something is there...
Oh, so like Die Hard 4.
*Brought to you by Samsung.

Why does a grill need a screen and buttons? Maybe I'm living in the stone age, but what I call grilling involves putting charcoal to a flame.

It's a smoker, with a port for a temp probe in the meat.
When you smoke something for 10-12 hours it's nice to get temp readings from wherever. It might also have automatic control for temperature management.
- Why that needs to be connected to the internet is an entirely different matter though.

PLEASE tell me you sent this message via smoke signals.

"Le Firmware? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?"

But supposed they invented a whole new kind of meat and your grill wasn't ready to deal with it? How would you feel then? Pretty darn silly, that's how!

Idk I just simply wouldn't buy the wifi grill

I have a Christmas tree with built-in LED lights where I can change their colors and make patterns and animations. Every year I get it out I have to do a firmware update on my Christmas tree before I can use it 😂

If they are WiFi controlled that’s actually a good thing, as it sounds like the manufacturer is still supporting it & hopefully updating it to prevent security issues & hacks!
But this is also why I personally try not to buy WiFi enabled gadgets unless it really needs to be remotely accessible.

Yet more reasons that charcoal/firewood is superior.

If you want to spend all day watching it. I set the Traeger and forget it until I get a notification that the food is at temperature.

The same kind of grill that can be bricked remotely if you stop paying for software updates.

What happens if the grill resets anyway? You get back to the default wallpaper?

Realistically they probably didn't use the traeger until the 4th, so they were about a year behind on "updates"

Unless you're my dad, then he finds any excuses he can to use his traeger. The thing can smoke a damn good brisket, software updates be damned!

semi related

Hacking My Smart Grill - Intercepting SSL to AWS Services via Firmware Modification ~> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tH6VU6chEc

Not to defend this practice but my guess is that the firmware was released before Thanksgiving, but the owner didn't turn on the grill until Thanksgiving, which is when the grill picked up the firmware.

Guy is still an idiot for buying a device that REQUIRES Internet access.

quick, hit the manual override before it’s too late 🖲️

Now it can run Crysis

Looks like it is a crysis already.

I wonder how long it takes for the firmware update to take place. A few minutes? An hour?

I recognize the community I’m in rn. Just curious about how long it actually takes. I doubt it takes very long, or happens very often.

In a similar vein was the location of the charging port on the Apple mouse. Sure it seems asinine, but you only charge it like once a month, so it really isn’t an actual issue. It was just an excuse to hate on Apple products.

They could have made it possible for the user to choose when to update, for example after using it. Apple could have just stuck the port in front and let people charge while using the mouse. Both have no downsides
- I’m not disagreeing, just pointing out that it is likely not as big of an issue as people make it.
In regards to your apple mouse example, surely it's relevant to know how long the charging process is. The hangups I would have are when the interruption happens, how quickly is it resolved, similar to your points about the firmware on the grill.
If it takes 30 seconds to recharge to a point of usability, fine, no real harm. But if it takes 10-20 minutes to get to a usable state, then we have an issue.
A related scenario is if the Nintendo switch drains completely of battery; even plugging it into a dock and trying to play docked, you still have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to give it enough juice to boot back up.
- Having used these mice, you can get through the day with like a 2-minute charge, then leave it overnight to cover the next few months.
- A quick search suggests that a 2 minute charge will provide a few hours of use, while it takes about 2 hours to charge it fully. Whether that is acceptable or not is up to the user, of course. But to me that seems pretty reasonable. Though none of this really matters for me, as I don’t use mice.

That's a really nice grill you got there...

poor baby. who grills out on thanksgiving? also my charcoal grill never does this

It's very possible, dare I say preferred, to have a traditional Thanksgiving spread getting made in the kitchen while someone grills up some veggies.

the hazards of living in the burbclaves

Remember to update your grill and turn it off before Thanksgiving!

Sounds like the start of Cory Doctorow's book Radicalized.

I wouldn’t use it, but if you want one with software then there’s nothing wrong with it updating.

A GPU?

Probably not. But it would be rad if it could run Doom.

One from Traeger Grills apparently 😂