You need good eyesight and a steady hand to build it as there are many electronic components to assemble onto the circuit board, but this type of build is well documented out on another forum (he uses a BGE smoker) or check on github.
It has 3 meat probes and a pit probe, also supports a thermocouple. It has a servo control to automatically move a damper or similar lightweight flap door. It supports a USB wifi module and has a software package that renders a graph on your smartphone or computer web browser to show your temps and the fan duty cycle through the cook. Has a control panel to set alarms etc... that was all available a few years ago. Not sure how many new bells and whistles are available now.
I think it cost me around $120 to build it, and I really like mine, even though I dont have a snazzy 3D printed case like many of the builders use. I put mine in a small waterproof tub that I hacked with a utility knife... I am almost ashamed to show it, but see below.
Sometimes people will sell an assembled unit when they upgrade to the next version. One of those would be a good buy because you might have the benefit of cheap labor if they sell to cover their parts for the new one.
I have never been stranded trying to use a Heatermeter, but have had a few fans go out over the years (heat soak after I unplugged everything, or left out in the rain) I lost a wifi module after a cook in the rain one time because it was on a USB extension so I could put the antenna around the corner of my smoker for a better signal to the house.
The main reason I built this one was so I could get the temperature controls on my phone and generate cook logs to and graphs to "see" how cooking different meat loads works in a vertical insulated cabinet.
While I do not have a probe for each piece of meat in the cabinet, you can see in the PDF how meat temps do not increase linear... there is the "stall" in temps in the middle of the cook.
I load my cabinet with the biggest pieces of meat towards the bottom, so the 13 lb brisket was on the rack above the 17 pounder. The meat temps looked similar during the cook, but the big one passed the smaller one at the 8 hour mark.
Also see the end of the cook where I set the temp to 250 because I wanted to get finished on time. You can see a slight increase in the slope of the meat temps for that time. While this worked ok, I think using the higher temp sooner in the cook or just starting an hour earlier would be better for a lower stress and sweeter smelling cook.
The Heatermeter was pioneered by Bryan Mayland in FL.
http://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/5a0bb1077c6 ... ontrol.pdf
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