Luteijn/Thermostat

Project "Thermostat":

Project Luteijn/Thermostat
Status	In progress
Contact	Luteijn
Last Update	2018-03-01

Background

My house has a thermostat in the living room. It controls the central heating bij switching a boiler on and off. Although it is a relatively advanced thermostat (Honeywell Chronotherm IV), that even has some provisions for remote controlling/overriding, and extra temperature sensors, I just have the basic connector-plate that is missing the physical connections for this. And I'm not going to bother hacking them in, as I'm not satisfied with the current set-up for several reasons.

• My version of the Thermostat is the basic on-off non-modulating version, as at the time I bought it, the boiler didn't support Open Therm anyway, and Open Therm is only 'open' for certain values of 'open'. Boiler is upgraded and now has Open Therm capability, also quite a bit of the Open Therm stuff is now opened up by reverse engineering etc.
• I don't care that the temperature in the living room is 'adequate' if I'm in the study where it is not adequate. If it is too hot in the study, I could turn down the radiator there, but if it is too cold in the study and the living room thermostat has shut down the boiler, it won't get any warmer.
• Although there is some intelligence/self-learning included in the thermostat, so it starts heating in time to have the house warm at the scheduled time, it doesn't handle rapid weather changes too well, and the scheduling is a bit limited. It would be nice if it could read the weather forecast and be a bit more aware of presence and adjust its program on that.
• I don't want a 'cloud-based' thermostat, but don't mind a home computer making the decisions.

Some related info

Installers manual for a similar Chronotherm IV explaining how to get to the installer's menu (TL;DR: press all three buttons [i] [^] and [v] at the same time for a few moments), and what to do when you get there to activated more features: https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/techlit/TechLitDocuments/69-0000s/69-1510.pdf

Bigger characters to make a large 'current temperature' display: http://www.gregington.com/2013/10/displaying-large-text-on-lcd-displays.html

Basic idea

• Replace the thermostat by a relay/FET capable of handling the 24 V 'interface' to the Boiler. (arelay is enough for basic on-off 24V, FET probably needed if I want to talk Open Therm to it instead). Control this 'switch' with a microcontroller that can take more input into account than the Chronotherm can/does.
• Initially just have the Chronotherm proxied by the microcontroller via a direct wired connection, then built up from there.
• An ESP would seem like a useful microcontroller, as it could get its input(s) wirelessly, and a nice step two would be to have one ESP control the boiler, and another connected to the Chronotherm, so it can be easily moved to whatever room I want it to monitor, and have them talk to each other, either directly or via MQTT.
• Next, move the final decision making away from the Chronotherm, and make it just one of potentially many sensors providing suggestions. Final decision to turn on/off the Heater would be made on the microcontroller controlling the Boiler, but it might be 'strongly influenced' by a more intelligent program running on a homeserver.
• Add more mini-thermostats/sensors throughout the house that can indicate the 'need for heat' based on current temperature, Rel. Humidity, user-input (e.g. a big 'I am fscking cold, activate boiler now - RED ALERT, all engines flanking speed, ahead warp-factor 9, damn the torpedoes, go to defcon 1, dive-dive-dive, women-and-children-first'-panicbutton) and basically OR all these to decide to ('strongly suggest' the microcontroller to) switch on the heater. These would/could/should have a little 'flame' display/led/indicator to show the current boiler state too, to reassure the user(s) heat is on its way/not being generated needlessly.
• Graph the information collected by the sensors to try and find patterns to optimize the decision process and hopefully avoid user-intervention as much as possible.
• etc.

Work done so far

• Not enough.
• Made a wikipage
• Looked into working of existing heating set-up.
• Ordered some small ESP based boards and sensors from China.
• Experimented with 16x2 LCD displays to be used as status displays.
• Practiced sensor graphing from existing CO2/Temp/Hum meter (similar to Voltcraft C-60)
• Looked into existing stand alone e-thermometers to be enhanced by an ESP or gutted for parts.
• Got some experience controlling relay by microcontroller to open garage-door
• Analogue sensor experience from garage-door open sensor. (As it only had an analogue pin left that can't be allowed to go completely low, it doubles as the active low RESET pin)
• Saved up some old candy tins and toothpaste caps that might work nice as housing and knobs for rotary encoders

Basically waiting for more parts to arrive and some free time to make the Chronotherm work wirelessly and experiment with placing it in different rooms.

LCD Layout

16x2 cells, each having 5x8 pixels, with a 1 pixel gap between cells, or alternatively seen, 6x9 pixels with one 'dead' row and column per cell. Or, a screen of 95x17 pixels with a few lines in it. Unfortunately there are only 8 programmable characters so it's not possible to fake a completely bitmapped display, but an 8 cell area could be done, and there are libraries for doing a 'big' font using reusable tiles.

A Thermostat display should probably by default show current room temperature in the big font, and the current target temperature in a smaller one, as well as a small clock and a symbol indicating if this thermostat is requesting heat, and a flame on to indicate if the boiler is currently running. Pressing a button could cycle the display to show settings like room name, overall system status, and/or information of other things going on in the house. After all, if you have a small screen able to talk/listen to MQTT in each room, might as well use it to display events coming in.

Mock up of display

to the left a crude version of the large font showing 17. arrow indicates target temperature,humidity (if applicable is also shown). The 🔥 flame to show boiler is on (reported from boiler controller), and a '+' is another status indicator e.g. showing this node wants heat.

▀	█			▀	▀	█	o	→	2	0	°	3	2	%	+
	█				█		1	3	:	3	7	:	4	2	🔥

A rotary controller would be fun, but 3-4 buttons (next item,select,prev item,cancel) would also work as a control panel for local control/cycling through other displays.

comments welcome

23:21 <@Juerd> luteijn: https://github.com/Juerd/eq3-max voor inspiratie :)