Ideas

A collection of ideas related to the Open Thermostat project

Using several small and independent thermostats connected to a central unit

Assumptions

• thermostats should be placed close to where people are (sofa, kitchen table, etc) instead of being mounted in walls;
• thermostats should be invisible;
• with more thermostats it's possible to achieve a better analysis on the use of boilers or other heat source.

Idea

Use several independent, small and non intrusive thermostats, communicating with a central unit over bluetooth.

The thermostats functional components would be:

• thermal sensor;
• bluetooth chip;
• microcontroler (if the bluetooth chip does not have enough capabilities to read from the sensor and send the temperature to the central unit);
• a multicolored led - for error checking (for example red=no pairing, blue=paired);
• a small potentiometer to tune the thermal sensor;
• a small battery (something like a 2032 battery).

The central unit could be a arduino board with bluetooth and a ethernet/wifi shields.

The thermostats would communicate the temperature the central unit which would act as a gateway (although it can be used for more).

Analysis

The small thermostat are very simple in terms of software (do the pairing with the central unit and send values every now and then).

The central unit has to receive the temperature and provide it for processing. Then it can actuate on a boiler, provide a web page with the current and historic temperatures, etc.

Eventually other type of sensors could be added (light, movement, etc).