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So let's take a look at the blower used by these two controllers. Essentially, they look like the normal Flame Boss blower, except they have a plastic case attached to the side to house the electronics. The blower is rated at 12 CFM as stated on the Flame Boss web site, which is plenty of capacity for most home cookers. The blower has no damper, but it does have a wind shield over the intake. This prevents wind from entering the blower and increasing the airflow through your cooker, making it difficult to maintain low temperatures.
If you order the EGG Genius, you only have one installation option, the Kamado Cooker option which consists of two plates that fit into the grooves of your cooker's lower vent. If you purchase a Flame Boss 400 controller, you specify the attachment option when you order. In addition to the Kamado Cooker option, there is the universal attachment option. This consists of a universal manifold option, a universal thread adapter option, and some miscellaneous hardware for attaching either option to various cookers.
The Flame Boss 400 and EGG Genius units do not have a physical alarm or beeper in them. All alerts and notifications are done via notifications and SMS text messages on your phone. (You can go into the Account section of the appropriate App and configure a phone number to receive text alerts.) Some of the events which will cause an alarm are:
If you have enabled SMS text alerts, you will receive text messages like this when an alarm goes off:
Note: If you have enabled SMS text messages but the App says your number is not confirmed, and if the App won't send you a confirmation code, disable SMS text messages, delete your phone number, and then add your number back and re-enable SMS text messages. SMS text messages should then resume working. You may remember that the original BBQ Guru Competitor had a "Good Neighbor Feature" which allowed you to disable the alarm so as not to disturb your neighbors. These controllers have no alarms so no such feature is necessary. The current output of the blower, expressed as a percentage is shown on the Cook summary screen. This is useful for knowing what's going on in your cooker. If the pit temp is rising and the blower is off, you may have too much ambient air flowing through the cooker. If the pit temp is falling and the blower is running constantly, you are probably running out of charcoal:  The Flame Boss 400 and EGG Genius controllers will remember the target pit temperature if power is lost so that it can resume control of the cooker's airflow when power resumes. What Flame Boss calls its Keep Warm feature you may also recognize as being somewhat similar to BBQ Guru's Ramp Mode. Ramp mode is a clever mode in which the controller will lower the cooker temperature once the meat gets close to being done. As the meat temperature rises closer and closer to the target meat temperature, the controller continues to lower the cooker temperature. Ultimately, when the meat temperature reaches the target temperature, the cooker will also be at the meat target temperature. As a result, you can hold your meat at your target temperature as long as the cooker has fuel left to burn. This is the version invented and patented by BBQ Guru. However, Flame Boss uses a variation that they call Keep Warm mode in which the controller senses the meat has reached its target temperature, and drops the pit target temp all at once to the Keep Warm temperature that you set. This lets the cooker cool down as fast as it can until the cooker temperature is about equal to the meat temperature. No matter how it is implemented, the goal is to allow you to hold your meat at its final temperature should you not be available to immediately see to it. You can set a Keep Warm temperature in the same location that you set your Meat Alarm temperature for each meat probe. Note that on the EGG Genius, you can set a different Keep Warm temperature for each of the three meat probes. If you do so, the unit will switch to the Keep Warm mode if ANY of the three probes reach their meat alarm target. This could be confusing if you have three different foods going with separate target temperatures, so make sure that you consider this if using the Keep Warm feature on more than one meat probe. The Flame Boss 400 and EGG Genius allow control of temperatures as low as 160°F. This isn't low enough for truly cold smoking. And of course, the ability of the controllers to actually control temperatures this low will depend also on your cooker and how airtight it is. The Flame Boss units use a PID control mode as the default. What's PID? Here's what is in Wikipedia: "The PID controller calculation (algorithm) involves three separate parameters, and is accordingly sometimes called three-term control: the proportional, the integral and derivative values, denoted P, I, and D. [...]these values can be interpreted in terms of time: P depends on the present error, I on the accumulation of past errors, and D is a prediction of future errors, based on current rate of change. The weighted sum of these three actions is used to adjust the process via a control element such as the position of a control valve or the power supply of a heating element."A little more reading reveals that it is used in feedback loop method which turns out to be a pretty good method of controlling a process when you don't have good knowledge about the process itself. Obviously, the controller doesn't know how big your cooker is. It doesn't know how airtight your cooker is. It doesn't know how much charcoal is in your cooker. There are a lot of unknowns, so this feedback loop method allows the controller to accurately control a wide variety of cookers in a wide variety of environments. We obtained a little more information about the learning process from the makers of the Flame Boss. The learning feature requires at least one oscillation above and below the Set temperature to learn a cooker. The time that it takes varies, but is not less than 10 minutes. Opening the lid will interrupt an oscillation and a new one will start the next time the cooker reaches the set point. Adjusting the Set temperature will also interrupt the learning. Therefore, you should avoid opening the lid and changing the pit set temperature as much as possible to achieve the best temperature control. And finally, one last bit of information about the learning process. It is NOT retained from cook to cook. If you turn the Flame Boss controller off, all the learning information is lost. So clearly it is best not to turn the Flame Boss controller off and on in the middle of a cook. The reason why the learning information isn't retained is that the parameters for controlling the temperature of the cooker during the early phase of a cook are quite different from what they are in the later phase of the cook. If you were to retain the values from the last cook, they wouldn't apply very well to the start of the next cook. Rather it is best to simply start anew with each cook. Open Lid Detect (OLD) is a feature where the controller detects the rapid drop in temperature caused by opening the lid. It stops the blower to prevent stoking the fire unnecessarily and then manages the rise in temperature after the lid is closed. It appears the both the Flame Boss 400 and EGG Genius have the OLD feature. We say this based upon their behavior when the pit temperature suddenly drops. And we say "appears" because there is no external indication that OLD is in effect and there is no menu option to set the OLD delay period for these controllers. It appears to be fixed at 2 minutes. (The Flame Boss 300, which has a display, will show the word OPEN on the display when it is in OLD mode. It also has the ability to configure the period of time that the blower should be kept off when the controller detects an open lid.) We'll show you how both controllers' Open Lid Detect feature performed later in the review. There is no built in timer function on the Flame Boss 400 or the EGG Genius. From time to time, the firmware in your Flame Boss 400 or EGG Genius may need to be updated. The controllers check for the availability of newer firmware levels when they connect to the Flame Boss servers. If one is required, the unit will update its firmware automatically. You probably won't even notice it until you get a notification on your phone:
 It is possible to disable automatic firmware updates by using the web interface at www.myflameboss.com. After you log on, go to the Profile section:
 Select the "Settings" link for your controller.
 There you will find an option called "Auto update firmware?" which you can then turn off.
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