Why I built this

A kiln fires for thirty hours. Nobody watches thirty hours. You set the programme, you go to bed, and in the morning the kiln is cooling and the only record of what happened is whatever the controller still has on its screen.

That bothered me more than it should have. Everything about a firing is a measurement — the climb, the hold, the way the elements work harder in their third year than their first — and all of it was being thrown away as it happened. Not because anyone decided to throw it away, but because keeping it was nobody’s job.

So I started keeping it. It began as a Raspberry Pi on a shelf next to one kiln, reading the cloud every few seconds and writing rows to a database, and the first thing it taught me was that I had been wrong about my own firings. The kiln does not do what the programme says. It overshoots, it holds, it waits. You cannot see that in a number on a panel and it is obvious the moment you see it drawn.

What I decided early, and have not changed

It never controls the kiln. There is no command this can send to a furnace and no button here that changes what one is doing. That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. A kiln is a three-kilowatt heating element in somebody’s garage or workshop, and the place to start and stop one is at the controller or in the app the manufacturer wrote and tested for it — not on a web page, behind a session cookie, on a phone that might be in somebody else’s hand. I would rather this be less useful and never be the reason a kiln did something nobody asked it to.

Nothing is thrown away. Every reading of every firing is kept at the resolution it arrived at, and about an hour after a firing ends it is filed away whole and stays downloadable. A summary is easy and cheap and is not the same thing: the question you want to ask in two years is one you have not thought of yet, and you can only ask it if the readings are still there.

It says what it does not know. If a reading is stale, the page says so. If a figure is indicative rather than measured, it says that too. A dashboard that quietly shows a number from three hours ago as though it were current is worse than one that shows nothing, because you will act on it.

On Nabertherm

This is built on Nabertherm’s own cloud. It signs in with the login you already use in the MyNabertherm app and reads exactly what that app reads — no extra hardware, nothing wired into the controller, nothing modified. That is possible because the controllers and the cloud behind them are genuinely good: the data is there, it is consistent, and it arrives.

I think of this as sitting alongside their app rather than competing with it. The app is where you operate the kiln, and it should be. This is the logbook — the part that answers what did it do rather than what is it doing. They are different questions and they want different tools.

If you are at Nabertherm and reading this: I would genuinely like to talk. Get in touch.

Who is behind it

Kiln Dashboard is built and run by Matrix Technosphere, a small engineering outfit in Bengaluru, India. It is a small enough operation that when you write in, I am the one who reads it — which is the main reason I ask people to write in.

See a real firing or connect your own kiln. Questions about whether it works with yours? Ask me.