This is the first year that we’ve participated in the Pick’n In Grant Park BBQ Competition whose proceeds go towards the preserving the historic Grant Park in Atlanta. This year’s competition brought together 15 professional BBQ teams, competing to see who could bring together the best comprehensive BBQ meal including chicken, ribs, and pork. This year, our iVision team, “Pigabytes,” decided to up our BBQ game with technology, specifically through the use of LogicMonitor Dashboards.
Rather than monitor the cooking progression and temperatures of our BBQ food by manually checking it, we decided to use LogicMonitor to monitor it for us. We found a wireless cooking thermometer system online called Tappecue, which let us wirelessly transmit the settings of eight different probes monitoring the temperature and status of our food and beverages. To monitor the Tappecue probes with LogicMonitor, we reached out to Tappecue directly to obtain their API information that we used for our LogicMonitor Datasource. Once we had the information we needed, our custom LogicMonitor Datasource sent that information into LogicMonitor and we were able to create our LM dashboards in less than hour – shorter than the amount of time we even spent talking to Tappecue.
With the use of LogicMonitor, we were able to monitor the real-time performance of:
- Internal meat temperature of our: chicken, pork, and ribs
- Big green egg temperature
- Historical view of internal vs. external meat temperature
- Beer cooler temperature
- Ambient air temperature
- Percentage of completion
Here’s an image of our Pigabytes LM dashboard:
Although we didn’t end up taking home the Gold in the overall BBQ competition, we definitely won for the most creative and unique way of monitoring our cooking process. This process demonstrated how truly easy and flexible LogicMonitor is to use – and how customizable its Datasource/API platform is (along with how creative of a thinker our Manager of ESS is!). Let alone it illustrated how intuitively appealing LM’s dashboards are, given the traffic jam they caused around our BBQ station. We were definitely the most talked about at the competition.
Check out some more photos of our set up:
