Ever use a BTC-9090?

[TBLbrewer]

I just bought one of these on eBay for $21.00 shipped.
http://iphone.ebay.com/Pages/ViewIt...ssPageName=ADME:L:OU:US:1123&autoredirect=off

thoughts?

 

[TBLbrewer]

Here's another link. I didn't realize the first one probably only works on a smartphone.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160404245273&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Thoughts? I'm probably going to use this for an electric smoker... I've never worked with a PID before.

 

[ScubaSteve]

Nope, but I saw the same auction. Let us know how it turns out!

 

[kcwcc]

You need an external SSR to use this. Just making sure you knew that.

 

[TBLbrewer]

It arrived to day. Now I just need an ssr and a thermocouple. Can any one suggest a place I can get the thremocouple?

You need an external SSR to use this. Just making sure you knew that.

yep. Thanks though.

 

[Fozzie]

I've been watching this for a few days, with an external SSR, could this be used to control an element in a two vessel no-sparge system? It looks like it would be fine for mash temperature, but I thought I saw somewhere you needed to be able to control the element manually for the boil, I'm not sure though, kind of new to PID's. Or could I just crank it up to a temperature over boiling?

Thanks for any help.

 

[TBLbrewer]

The way I understand it this thing will maintain it at what ever temp you tell it to i.e. 212*. I'm planning on getting a bcs to control my brewery, and use this on an electric smoker.

 

[kcwcc]

1. Sure Electronics - cheap thermocouple probes, PID controllers and SSRs. Don't tell anyone! They are in China but ship quick and relatively cheap considering the savings you get on the probes. I just bought 12 J type probes and 6 DS1820 probes and 6 40A SSRs last week. I designed my own PID controller so I didn't get one of theirs.

2. Generally you use a burner to come up to within 20F of your target (under) and then use your controller to control to your target using the element. You can figure out the best pre-heat target just using plain water to start...I use well water at 58F and it takes 45 min to get to 130F with my cheapo burner. If you know your BTUs of your burner it's a simple calculation. Then you can feed new setpoints for your step mash if you so desire....you need to keep the damping quite high to avoid any overshoot...i.e climb slow to your target...you can set this rate by either messing with your PID gain or by using intermediate setpoints. Since this a first order system, PID is actually not fully utilized...PI is enough to get to target and stabilize and the autotune will realize that...although I never use autotune myself, having been tuning PIDs for some while I find it always tries to use D even when it shouldn't. Again, not a problem with slow dynamics. Another thing to note is that some cheap PIDs only guarantee 0.5% of full scale and not always an absolute maximum error, say +-2C...you need to watch for this as 0.5%FS on 1600F is a big error.