After communicating with Bradley on why there are different versions of firmware for the North American locations they did reply. I hope that I got their information correct, because the employee that was answering my questions would reply in a short sentence, and not fully answer all questions in my emails. I’m not sure how knowledgeable he was on the P10, or if he was just relaying the information from another employee or was just following a flow sheet, or just being purposely vague.
From what I understand Bradley has made a change in their circuit board. The new board and the earlier board are not compatible. This new board; the “blue circuit board” original release was b019, it was later updated to version b021. This board can accept future upgrades. The earlier models that have a green circuit board, have the firmware version b002. Those that have this version cannot update their firmware. That is not what was advertised when it was sold. To make matters worse, those that have version b002 if they attempt to update their board to b021 will do permanent damage to their board. You would think that this is important for the end user to know. If one doesn’t know this, there is the possibility for a person with b002 to contact another user to send them the update file b021 and attempt to install it.
This is from a document that the employee sent me:
Original Operating Firmware for BS1019 is b002 and it can not be updated……..If the update is used for an earlier version, it will render the memory module UNUSABLE and the entire circuit board will have to be replaced and it will not be covered for warranty.
Now does this mean this particular update cannot be used to update version b002, or the b002 cannot be upgraded at all, either now or in the future. Or if an update is needed they will program a different file to update this version. That was one of the questions the employee failed to answer.
For those who want to know what the update from b019 to b021 fixed:
"This upgrade fixes the issue where meat probe 1 and 2 internal temperature was not available to check during the smoking session.”
When I stated that version b002 was not able to check the internal temperature during the cook, he replied:
"To view the current meat temp with your smoker, you will cancel the target set temp, and press the button again to view the current temp.”
This is correct, but I would consider this a bug. Why would a company program it this way, and make the end user take extra steps to have to reset the target temp? This is not a big deal for me, but may be for others. I don’t use the Bradley meat probes for two reasons; 1) You can’t hear the alarm when it does go off, and 2) It’s a chore to check the internal meat temperature during the cook. At least they could have done would be to have the meat temperature display alternate from current temp to set temp. I just came up with a third reason; without Bluetooth or Wi-Fi you still need to go to the smoker and manually push keys to get a reading. So I will continue to use the meat probes of my Thermoworks Signals.
