Anyone here make their own heating controller?

Ubbquittious

Using an arduino or other microcontroller or a Pi? If so how did you get on?

I'm going to have a go, just for the craic

Metric Tensor

I'm about to do a half way house using Fibaro z wave relays and a raspberry pi with home assistant.

Not quite making my own but a step beyond an off the shelf model.

I'm still waiting for one part that wasn't in stock. How do you plan to switch the 220v supply?

Ubbquittious

Metric Tensor wrote: »

I'm about to do a half way house using Fibaro z wave relays and a raspberry pi with home assistant.

Not quite making my own but a step beyond an off the shelf model.

I'm still waiting for one part that wasn't in stock. How do you plan to switch the 220v supply?

A fistful of relays from farnell and a few bc547's I reckon.
I was hoping to avoid it altogether and use only 12v but I got a free 220v pump with my stove and 12v ones are rather expensive. Though I like the idea of having a system that can run without mains or inverters

tnegun

I use a Raspberry Pi, USB z wave adaptor and z wave relay.

The controller is the Raspberry Pi with a usb z wave adaptor running Domoticz and its has scheduled jobs that run daily for hot water and heating with some intelligence re the room temps and the time the heating comes on in the am.

The z wave dual relay, I've a 3 zone system but it's a small house so 1 relay controls the heating up and downstairs those are interlocked with the stats on each floor and the second controls the heating interlocked with a cylinder stat.

The nice thing is that the z wave relays work in parallel with the existing analogue controller so its a fall back should something happen the Pi.

Been running this for the last 2 years and its only failed twice once was a corrupt SD and the second time upgrading Domoticz messed up the z wave config but that was easily sorted after a cold shower

Metric Tensor

I plan to leave the existing basic manual time switch in parallel with the z-wave set up too. It should be off all the time but will be there in case of an emergency!

10-10-20

I'm doing it now with OpenHAB2 and z-wave.
I'm making some progress. I've documented the OpenHAB2 install here under Ubuntu, but I have yet to get into seriously writing the scripts. That's going to be the hardest part as the language is based on Xbase, and I'm only learning...

I plan to control the TRV's initially, I got a Eurotronic Spirit TRV from homebots, and I'll use OpenHAB2 to call for the boiler when needed.

kenmc

i remember someone did something:
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057804603

Ubbquittious

I made a start anyway, decided on a PIC16F1789 which has 256 whole bytes of storage that I should be able to cram the heating schedule in it. It's a bit different to the usual heating controller because it has to make do with and distribute the heat that's given to it rather than switch on the boiler when it's cold.

Got the bluetooth, analogue channels and the SHT31 temp/humidity sensor going but I'll have to order the rest of the parts before I can go much further. Need a realtime clock and 14 IC temperature sensors and a few relays. Hopefully I'llhave the PCB ordered by next week

ozmo

Ubbquittious wrote: »

I made a start anyway, decided on a PIC16F1789 which has 256 whole bytes of storage that .. the bluetooth, analogue channels and the SHT31 temp/humidity sensor going but I'll have to order the rest of the parts before I can go much further. Need a realtime clock and 14 IC temperature sensors and a few relays. Hopefully I'llhave the PCB ordered by next week

I just got a new boiler - so considering something similar - I have a few ESP32 modules so will likely use those - they have a lot of that stuff you mention built in - bluetooth and wifi and tons of memory space - tiny too...

What smarts do you think we could put into it - Id like make it more than a timer.

Ubbquittious

ozmo wrote: »

I just got a new boiler - so considering something similar - I have a few ESP32 modules so will likely use those - they have a lot of that stuff you mention built in - bluetooth and wifi and tons of memory space - tiny too...

What smarts do you think we could put into it - Id like make it more than a timer.

Loads. You could probably store a database of historic temperature data in that if you have a decent size SD card connected and run a webserver off it without need for any other gateway or server. Not sure if SQLite has been ported to it or if it's too big for 512k of RAM or if anything similar exists

Ubbquittious

Getting there. Bluetooth,relays, RTC all seem to be working. My first version of the board had a bobo in it so had to wait another 3 weeks for more to arrive. Just a bit more coding to do and I can install it



I have space for

13 analogue temperature sensors
2 I2C temperature/humidity sensors
7 relays (for this house I'll be only using 4) 1 for the pump 3 for the rads