DIY Pottery Kiln Controller

I recently found myself digging in the attic to find my box with microcontrollers, soldering irons, etc. A new/old hobby returned to me. Once when I was a junior developer, I started to learn about microcontrollers. I remember the victorious feeling of getting a blinking led to work.

Now my wife is a hobby potter with aspiration to make it a business, and she stumbled upon a kiln for almost no money. It is a small manually controlled kiln, which is fine, but I thought it would be a good idea to make a smart controller for it.

Its fun to see how much easier it has become to make stuff like this with an esp8266 or esp32. I used to play with arduino, but this is a lot easier. You just install esphome or something similar, and you can start coding in a mix of lua and yaml-automations-config.

You want a PID controller? all you need is a few lines of yaml-config and voila you have one. An lcd screen with rotary encder and a menu to change settings? ESPHome has a component for that too.

Issues with the yaml or you need some advanced Lua scripts? Well the AI coder is here to help too. The only thing i need to do is the soldering and the wiring. And the AI can even help me debug this by providing me with a conversation partner.

I'm certain if I would spend some time, I could connect the AI to KiCad and have it generate the PCB for me.

Imagine that, a PCB designed by an AI, and a microcontroller programmed by an AI, add an assembly line and you have a factory that can be controlled by an AI to produce killer drones controlled by an AI.

Interesting times we live in, both fun and scary.