Comment by gorkish

You will be happy to know that they do already exist; there are the Stoker, BBQ Guru, Fragger, Cyberq, Digiq, Egg Genius, Auber controller, and more! Modern pellet smokers have a PID controller right in there. There's also my homebuilt monstrosity, but it's not for sale, and you wouldn't want to buy it anyway.

As someone who's been through a thought process that was likely similar to OP's dad, I can say it usually goes something like this for me:

"I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay one hundred dollars for two thermocouples, a fan and an 8 bit micro running some PID library I don't even have to write. I have all of that crap in my junk drawer."

For the record you can bring an oscilloscope to a BBQ. And a DMM. And grab those bench supplies and the logic analyzer while you're down there. And of course you didn't grab the spectrum analyzer, but you ended up needing it after all.

Things get a little crazy; the better part of a case of beer gets consumed, and the next day you're watching your brisket come up to temp on your phone while you pop into the hardware store for a piece of sheet metal. Your BBQ looks like you are building a nuke with all of the smoke and colored wires snaking out of the big ceramic bomb casing to breadboards and test gear and antennas. A rainstorm would easily cost you five thousand dollars right about now.

Over the next week or two the purple PCBs show up along with some red ones and blue ones and a big box from Digikey. You have to wait a little longer for the OLED display to show up from that ebay seller in China because damned if you are gonna pay Digikey's stupid price.

So naturally it takes you until the next summer to solder it together and thank god it works perfect the first and only time you will ever use it because you really don't want to have to try to get your code to compile again.

This is where the "You should sell it" guy comes in. And so you say thanks, but you think to yourself "Damned if anyone's gonna pay six hundred bucks for something they can buy for a hundred."