Before beginning this project, I had built a smoker. It's good for cold smoking, and I've done lots of bacon and cheese. These things are awesome. I've wanted to take the next step into cured and dried meat products. Thoughts of pancetta dance in my head.

I did some preliminary research to find out what's been done in the DIY space. The examples that I've managed to come up with are all terrible. The common the answer seems to be start with an old refrigerator and put a temperature controller on it so that it doesn't get too cold. However, that doesn't do anything to change the fact that the refrigerator has surface temperatures that are too low, which drives the humidity down. So the common answer is to then stick a humidifier into the refrigerator to make up for that. That leads to very uneven distribution temperatures and humidity, so then we need to stick a fan inside the thing to mix everything up. I've seen designs that also include light bulbs as auxiliary heating devices.

This design obviously works, because it has been repeated multiple times. From an engineering and design standpoint, though, it's a terrible mess of several systems that are operating out of their design range and fighting each other constantly. These leads to a terribly inefficient system of simultaneous heating and cooling with no consideration of control.

I wanted to put together a better design that would be more efficient, enable modular controls, and possibly data logging to help provide actual data in the event of a failure. So with that idea, it was off to the races.