Combustion Inc Wireless thermometer probe by Chris Young

[&roid]

I'm really interested in this, if it weren't for a painful tax bill I'd probably have ordered already. 

 

Use cases for me are:

 

• accurate prediction of time to doneness - no idea if this is true till we use it. But if it is, that's massive.  And with the multiple sensors its plausible it will be
• being able to use in situations where my wired probes (also thermoworks @JoNorvelleWalker) aren't useful - eg sealed in a sous vide bag
• just being a heck of a lot less messy than the wired setup - admittedly an ultra first world problem but this could replace 2-3 probes, their wires, my thermoworks signals unit and just work right out of the drawer: grab a piece of meat, stick it with the probe and I've got ambient, surface and core temperature monitoring instantly.  That really speaks to my OCD, I can't stand the tangled wires!

 

Edited February 1, 2022 by &roid (log)

[Raamo]

2 hours ago, &roid said:

 That really speaks to my OCD, I can't stand the tangled wires!

 

 

The wires on my probes.... they are flat metal and ouch they can hurt... I won't miss that at all!!!!

[CanadianHomeChef]

@ChefChrisYoung can you give us an update on shipping? Specifically, do you still expect that the first orders are to be shipped next month? I notice on the website it now says shipping in September, but I'm thinking that's just for later orders?

Thanks

[mgaretz]

Got my units today.  All I have done so far is to turn on the base and the thermometer. They automatically pair which is nice.  Charging the base now, will report back when I have had a chance to do a cook.

[&roid]

Exciting! Really looking forward to hearing how these units perform. Get cooking @mgaretz!

[yimyammer]

On 11/18/2022 at 10:21 PM, mgaretz said:

Got my units today.  All I have done so far is to turn on the base and the thermometer. They automatically pair which is nice.  Charging the base now, will report back when I have had a chance to do a cook.

 

what did you pay for them?

Are they performing as advertised?

 

theyre having a sale for $199 I'm considering but am concerned about buying the first iteration of this concept

[mgaretz]

41 minutes ago, yimyammer said:

 

what did you pay for them?

Are they performing as advertised?

 

theyre having a sale for $199 I'm considering but am concerned about buying the first iteration of this concept

 

Yes I paid for them.  They are working (functionally) but I have not cooked with them yet.

[CanadianHomeChef]

I ordered on day one and haven't gotten any notification of shipping yet.... did you get notification when it went out or was it just a nice surprise?

[mgaretz]

2 hours ago, CanadianHomeChef said:

I ordered on day one and haven't gotten any notification of shipping yet.... did you get notification when it went out or was it just a nice surprise?

I got a notification 

[&roid]

On 11/19/2022 at 4:21 AM, mgaretz said:

Got my units today.  All I have done so far is to turn on the base and the thermometer. They automatically pair which is nice.  Charging the base now, will report back when I have had a chance to do a cook.

How are they doing @mgaretz? Any chance to cook with them yet?

[mgaretz]

9 hours ago, &roid said:

How are they doing @mgaretz? Any chance to cook with them yet?

I have only done one cook.  A whole chicken on the smoker. The thermometer portion worked well, the predictive part needs work, but that’s why it’s in beta. 

[&roid]

4 hours ago, mgaretz said:

I have only done one cook.  A whole chicken on the smoker. The thermometer portion worked well, the predictive part needs work, but that’s why it’s in beta. 

I guess it was always going to be the hardest part to do right - none of the predictive ones I’ve seen so far come close on this aspect. 
 

makes me wonder why though - when I look at the curves for meat I’m cooking they seem really smooth and predictable. What are the factors that stop a device from extrapolating well?

[&roid]

@mgaretz just wondered how you were getting on with this?

 

Seems a bit strange that there aren’t reviews popping up if they started shipping 6-7 weeks ago. 

[mgaretz]

42 minutes ago, &roid said:

@mgaretz just wondered how you were getting on with this?

 

Seems a bit strange that there aren’t reviews popping up if they started shipping 6-7 weeks ago. 

Just did another cook a few days ago and it worked perfectly. 

[&roid]

Good news! Did it manage to predict the finish time better this time? What we’re you cooking with it?

[mgaretz]

1 hour ago, &roid said:

Good news! Did it manage to predict the finish time better this time? What we’re you cooking with it?

Yes, much better with the latest firmware.  I cooked a pork chop on the NFG. See the dinner thread for picture.

 

[afs]

Does anyone know what the Combustion probe is made out of (both the shaft and the yellow plastic-looking handle at the end)?

I've been on a quest to replace plastics in the kitchen with stainless steel, glass and silicone/rubber.  MEATER Plus says it's made out of stainless steel and ceramic, and I'm okay with sticking that inside a Stasher bag along with a sous-vide steak.

I'm hoping that the Combustion probes also use silicone or ceramic (not non-rubber plastic) for the handle area.

On both the Combustion probes and on the MEATER plus probes, I'm also wondering if they're designed to work with induction stovetops (i.e. non-ferritic), as sometimes I want to add a wireless probe there too.  Not a requirement, but it would be a nice bonus.

Things I did find out from the combustion.inc website ( FAQ – Combustion Inc )

• The probe's upper temperature is greater than 500F range, so that probably rules out virtually all rubbers and plastics for the handle end.  Maybe it's ceramic?
• They don't recommend using it with sous vide yet because they haven't finished testing how their gaskets seal under vacuum.  They intend for sous vide in vacuum-sealed bags to work.  I use Stasher bags, so that's not an issue for me.
• The wireless signal is degraded by obstructions (which I presume also includes water).
• They say that induction stoves are not a problem.

Edited January 18, 2023 by afs
Added additional findings (log)

[ChefChrisYoung]

Haven't been by this thread for awhile—and my apologies for that. 

 

AFS: I can answer your questions. The Predictive Thermometer's sensor tube is made from stainless steel. The rear charging contact on the handle is stainless steel. The handle itself is aluminum oxide ceramic. The internal seals are a fairly exotic high temperature silicone. There is a screw in the handle that is nickel-platted copper, which is directly connect to a precision thermistor in the handle—this screw acts as a heat pipe to measure the ambient temperature around the boundary layer of the food. And, yes, it's fine on an induction stove top. 

 

Regarding the predictions, based on the data customers are sending us from our beta-testing program, they seem to generally working pretty well for higher temperature, or relatively quick cooks (pan-roasting). At 30% of the way to the target temperature, the average error across all cooks in our database is just over 11%, but 50% of the way to done the error averages a around 8%, and by the time we're at 90% of the way to done the average error is usually less than 2% and converges nicely to rarely being off by more than a few seconds. 

 

The caveats here are that if you flip the food, change the temperature, move the coals around, etc this changes the speed of cooking. The algorithm does a pretty good job of handling these curve-balls and will just recalculating. That's probably about the best we can hope for since we can't actually anticipate what you're going to do on the fly.

 

There is a known bug that is tripping up the algorithm when the heating rate is particularly slow, such as sous vide and sometime low-temp smoking or reverse sears. This should get a fix in one of the upcoming firmware updates (probably the mid-February update).

 

There is also a bug with the instant read filter on some thermometers causing a bit too much oscillating, or sometimes a bit of an undershoot. This seems to be down to some very small variations with the internal sensor position during manufacturing. We're working on retuning this right now using a much bigger sample size of thermometers.

 

Finally, resting predictions are still a ways off. We've got enough data to have a pretty good idea on how we're going to solve it, but we're going to need a much bigger data set of cooks to do it well. To get to that, we need to finish adding cloud connectivity to our apps, so that we can make it easy for our customers to "donate" their data anonymously to help train the algorithm. I'm hopeful that we'll get there before summertime. But our team is pretty small and there is a lot to do. 

 

A few folks have commented on the lack of formal reviews. I think that this is mostly because we have not set out any samples to reviewers yet (yes, we're getting asked a lot). Reviews have a pretty big impact on a new product like this, and I made the decision that I would prefer to have a few months after scrambling to ship in December to work out the inevitable bugs. So, right now, what we've been focused on is reading as much feedback as our customers give us, using this to prioritize what we're working on improving, and generally stabilizing production and our supply chain. 

 

Feel free to ask questions or make some comments in this thread. I'll try to keep an eye on it. You can also always email hello@combustion.inc. I read nearly all of those emails myself and make sure that feedback or concerns gets responded to.

 

--Chris Young

 

 

Edited January 18, 2023 by ChefChrisYoung (log)

[&roid]

Great update @ChefChrisYoung 👍

 

I'm a really keen potential customer, can you tell us a bit more about the iOS app? Does the display unit connect to Wi-Fi and then to your phone? What features does the app have? Graphs? I love pretty pictures! 

[mgaretz]

Likely @ChefChrisYoung will chime in, but right now the probes are only Bluetooth.  Because of their small size, the range is limited but the plan is to use the display as a repeater but it's not implemented yet afaik.  There is also the thought that it could use third party devices that you already have as a bridge to wifi, but none of the units have wifi built in.

[ChefChrisYoung]

@mgaretzthe repeater functionality of the display is deployed. I think you’re using the beta-testing app, which does not support the mesh networking. But the public iOS app does work with the display as a range extender.
 

The Android app should (finally) be released on Monday or Tuesday. There will also be an update to the iOS app, although it’s mostly a bunch of behind the scenes infrastructure needed for the next app update.

 

In February we should be releasing major app updates that will add some critical features: graphing, raw sensor output, data exporting, and a bunch of battery life optimizations.

 

WiFi isn’t on the current roadmap. Based on my experience with Joule and ChefSteps, WiFi is incredibly costly for the company to maintain and provide customer support. Every router is a snowflake, and users often have them configured in ways that don’t reliably work. 
 

What is on the roadmap, that gets to a similar end result, is the ability of a mobile device (phone or tablet) to route a signal to the cloud so that you can check-in using another device.

 

We’re also looking to support the Matter protocol, which will allow our thermometer to connect to the internet via WiFi devices that support the protocol, like Alexa speakers or newer AppleTVs. 
 

But before we tackle these jobs, we’re going to be focused on dialing in the core functions like the Prediction Engine and better battery life management.

[mgaretz]

23 minutes ago, ChefChrisYoung said:

@mgaretzthe repeater functionality of the display is deployed. I think you’re using the beta-testing app, which does not support the mesh networking. But the public iOS app does work with the display as a range extender.

 

I have both installed so I will have to give it a try.  

[&roid]

On 1/20/2023 at 6:27 AM, ChefChrisYoung said:

WiFi isn’t on the current roadmap. Based on my experience with Joule and ChefSteps, WiFi is incredibly costly for the company to maintain and provide customer support. Every router is a snowflake, and users often have them configured in ways that don’t reliably work

That’s really interesting - as a naive end user I’d kind of assumed Wi-Fi would be simple to implement. Clearly not!

 

What sort of range can we expect between the probe and the base unit (assuming the probe is inside a kamado)? Would it work with the base unit about 5-10m away indoors? 
 

Matter is interesting too - our house is chock full of Apple TVs so this might work well. Is HomeKit support a thought?

[ChefChrisYoung]

Ceramic Kamado-style grills are reasonably transparent to a Bluetooth signal, and I can typically get 20m or more from my Big Green Egg with line of site to the display or my phone.

 

If the probe is inside a metal grill, the range is reduced a lot and difficult to predict, but more typically 3 to 5m before the signal needs to be repeated by the display.

 

Soon we’ll have some additional accessories to extend the range further by being additional repeaters that expanding our mesh network further.

 

Ultimately we’re trying to ship products with connectivity that “just works” and WiFi isn’t really compatible with that because there are too many variations on how it can be configured by the user.

 

HomeKit probably isn’t something we can really take advantage of to do this since it’s really a framework for integrating the control of a device like a light or speaker, rather than a means of routing data around (including up and down from the cloud servers). That’s where Matter is more useful, and specifically it’s Thread protocol. 
 

 

[CanadianHomeChef]

Got my pair of thermometers. Just haven't had time to do much with them yet.