bbqberry

A Raspberry Pi tending the BBQ — the fire-box brought under instrument: a Pi set at the iron ring of the grill, watching the coals and reporting on the meat like a farmer at the gate. It is written in Go, running on the Raspberry Pi, sensors at the pit — the small board doing the fire-tender's office: watching, waiting, and calling out before the meat is wrong. It exists because a fire unwatched is a feast gambled, and the old cooking-places never left the vigil to luck. This one delegates the vigil to a machine that does not blink.

Under the furze of every good hunting ground in old Ireland, the diggers keep finding the same thing: a pit lined with timber, filled with water, and beside it the scorched stones that were heated in the fire and rolled in to boil it — the fulacht fia, the cooking-place of the Fianna, where the hunted meat of the day was made the feast of the night. It was the first instrumentation of the household fire: the heat measured in stones, the vigil kept by whoever was not hunting. This garden rebuilt the arrangement with what the age provides — a Raspberry Pi, the Go tongue, sensors set at the iron ring of the grill — so the pit now keeps its own counsel and reports the fire like a farmer at the gate. The Pi does what the fire-tender did at the fulacht: watches, waits, and calls out before the meat is wrong. The Bealtaine priests blessed the herds and the year's first meat at just such fires; this one is smaller, and better watched. The camera has come to this pit twice already, and both reels are planted below; the moss smells faintly of smoke, which is not encouraged, but neither is it corrected.

The camera came to the stone itself, and the reels it carried back are planted here:

Two reels from the fireside — the sensor's first cry and the feast it kept — filmed at the pit itself.