Cool project (pun intended), especially for a beginner.
Did you ever wonder how kiln temperature profile control was automated before microprocessors?
Many years ago I salvaged such a controller from an old brickworks that had been shut down and abandoned years before that. The way it worked was fascinating.
It was like a chart recorder, but functionally reversed. There were rollers that held a long roll of film, about a foot wide, many feet long. On the film someone would stick a thin black tape, graphing the temperature profile they wanted. As the machine fed the film past an optical head (very slowly), a feedback loop would keep the optical head centered over the black tape. The analog signal from the head position was passed to an analog PID control circuit that controlled the kiln gas burners to keep the kiln temperature sensor signal the same as the optical head position signal. With some rather slow time constants, considering this was a huge brick-making kiln, and firings that took weeks.
If I ever get my 3rd workshop finished, it will include a metal casting kiln plus a ceramics kiln (also doubling as a glassware annealing kiln.) So I'll have the same problem. But that won't be for a while yet.
Hmmm... actually, progress has been stuck for a while, partly due to a TIG welding problem I haven't yet solved. Maybe I should ask the machinist experts here about that.
That workshop is to be the 'messy stuff' space. Woodworking, metal casting, ceramics, sandblasting, etc. Things that I'm never going to do again in my main workshop, after some regrettable fine dust contamination incidents.