The Fat Pipe In My Backyard

I bet somewhere there is a list of the 100 geekiest things you need to do before you die. Towards the bottom of said list there are probably a bunch of rather tame geeky things to do. Things like “meet a friend you met on the internet in real life,” or “adopt internet vernacular in your everyday speech.” I’m sure most of you have checked off a few items on the list but in general avoid checking off items whenever possible.

Somewhere, much higher up than the tame geeky things, I bet there is the following entry: “Find an elegant internet access solution for non-WiFi enabled devices in your backyard.” I’m working on checking off that item.

Part of my fantastic birthday bounty this year was the Stoker Temperature Controller for my Evil Black Egg grill. The Stoker basically will constantly monitor and adjust the temperature of my grill, while simultaneously monitoring the internal temperature of whatever I’m cooking on the grill. Undeniably, precision grilling is awesome, but this device really starts to shine when you consider that it enables 18-hour long grilling sessions with minimal interventions. Oh, I know what you’re going to say, “what if I have OCD and actually enjoy checking up on the grill?” Don’t worry, the Stoker has you covered. It has lightweight webserver on it so you can monitor its progress and target temperatures from a browser. To get to said webserver the Stoker needs to be connected to the internet, via its Ethernet port. This brings us back to checking off elegant internet solutions for the backyard.

Uh, yes? You, in the back, with your hand up, you have a question? “Couldn’t you just use the Stoker’s LCD screen to monitor its progress without all the Ethernet shenanigans?” GET THE HELL OFF MY BLOG.

Geeze, some people. Now we can continue knowing we’re surrounded by friends.

So, I could just run a Cat-5 cable out onto my patio. I could just get a long cable and run it through the door or a window when I want to grill. I don’t consider that elegant. I suppose, I could go slightly more sophisticated and run a cable through the walls and put a RJ-45 port outside on my patio. That’s a slightly more elegant solution, but I bristle at just anyone being able to plug into my network from outside.

The more astute have probably thought, “why doesn’t he just buy a wireless bridge?” Your point it duly noted. That was my first inclination as well. I don’t really want to connect a whole second network to my current network, so that solution is a tad overkill. Not that overkill is bad, but you normally have to pay extra for overkill. Eventually I found a device from our past, which offers solutions for our grilling future.

Logitech made a connection device for the Xbox and PS2 which would allow you to connect your console to your network. I suppose this was before WiFi was really popular and back when most people didn’t have an Ethernet port run behind their entertainment center (ha, those people are suckers!) It offers a single, wireless point-to-point connection, a wireless Cat-5 cable if you will. It’s just two boxes, each with an RJ-45 jack, the boxes each have little radio/receivers in them and they transmit the data that would be going over the cable. It doesn’t have to worry about protocols or any of that jazz like a wireless bridge would have to manage. Simple, elegant, and wireless. Just what every grill needs.