EGG Genius

First off yes, the app works to a degree and you don’t have to check on the smoker as much as you would with another, but the AI that controls the fan is horrible. It spams me pit open and closed messages like every other minute, which then cuts off the fan when I need it on the most. Why can’t we manually control the fan speed? Why can’t we set increases or decreases in speed when certain temps are hit? Why can’t the temp readings be accurate? Did I get a Lemmon? Or is everyone having this problem? I have to set it to 500 degrees just so the fan can stay on so I can hit 280. If I set it at the temp I want then it’ll coast either 40 degrees under or over. There are some times where it gets it right, but it can be so frustrating

This is more of a review of “flame boss”, the manufacturer of the device and their datacenter for internet connectivity. They really need to scale up there bandwidth in order to accommodate more customers, especially during holidays. During peak usage the device disconnects from their servers constantly and when that happens you need to jump through hoops to reconnect. Either restarting the device or navigating though unintuitive menus in the app to find local mode. However, once in local mode, the device always tries to reconnect to the internet which it cant or only does momentarily. They need a simple button on the app for local/offline mode and have that mode stay selected.

Let’s get this out of the way— it does the job. You can keep a relatively even pit temperature and achieve a relatively consistent cook. But I see a lot of issues with this app— namely, I frequently encounter disconnects from my controller that are clearly not due to my wifi setup (I have enterprise trade ubiquiti access points across the house). Also, there’s not really a way to customize stages of a cook. Eg; “do X until we hit temperature Y then do this other step”. Also, the probes on the egg genius are very inaccurate (measured against an NIST calibrated thermapen reference) compared to other thermistor based probes. I guess for the price it’s not awful. But for a bit more the Fireboard 2 is a much less bug free experience with more customization and vastly more accurate hardware.