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Old 01-04-13, 01:59 PM   #21
TimSmall
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Did you look at

Home Climate Control

at all for the software end of things?

It's algorithms and design look pretty good, and I'm planning on extending it for my system:

Gas heated multi-zone - 2 zones with UFH concrete slab, 2 zones with hard wood, and 2 zones with ceramic tiles plus 3 zones with "radiators". I also plan to have summer cooling with an outdoor underground cooling loop (no heat pump).

Should be reasonable to get the software up and running on a pi or similar.

Did you look at i2c to 1w bus bridges?

Cheers,

Tim.

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Old 01-04-13, 02:10 PM   #22
opiesche
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No, I've never seen that system
Looks interesting - in the end, it seems similar to what I did, only using an Arduino instead of the Pi.
My software is pretty rudimentary still, and doesn't support zone control valves - although it should be pretty trivial to add supply and return temperature sensors (something I've planned on doing anyway) and control a set of actuated valves. I supply zones just via the manifold's balancing valves, because the load of the different zones is pretty consistent, but I'm still considering adding a mixing valve - regardless, it would be good to measure supply and return; with a bit of math and some logging of how long the water heater runs, it would be fairly easy to calculate the efficiency of the entire system that way

I've not looked at the I2C bridges - the DS18B20 sensors I'm using are Dallas 1-wire, and they work very well with the 1w driver included in the latest Debian from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Because they're handled via a virtual file system, any number of sensors can be hooked up to the same GPIO pins, and they just show up as different directories. Every once in a while I get a failed measurement (it shows up as -0.62 degrees), but that's relatively easy to filter in software.
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Old 01-04-13, 03:51 PM   #23
TimSmall
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Quote:
Originally Posted by opiesche View Post
No, I've never seen that system
Looks interesting - in the end, it seems similar to what I did, only using an Arduino instead of the Pi.
You do have the option of purely running it on a Linux box (with a web UI) too. Might still be worth looking at merging the two bits of code - I'm sure the lead home climate control developer would be interested in your system either way, if you posted to the mailing list...

I'm planning to control actuators (both mo-mo type, and wax capsule), and also to measure various flow/return temps, and the outside temperature too (plus maybe solar radiation strength to avoid overheating the high-thermal-mass zones on sunny mornings).

The gas boiler (AKA heater, furnace etc.) which I'm using has a pretty sophisticated API, and I'll set the set-point flow temperature down to the minimum necessary to maximise efficiency (do a google image search for "condensing boiler return temperature efficiency" e.g.




etc. - I'm planning a setup without a mixing valve for this reason...

Quote:
I've not looked at the I2C bridges
They're quite handy in that they give you 8 1-wire busses for each i2c connection. I guy I know ("wookey" - he might turn up here later, since he's planning his UFH system at the moment) used them a few years ago to connect his ARM "BalloonBoard" to some Dallas 1-wire sensors for his solar thermal monitoring and control system.

Tim.

Last edited by TimSmall; 01-04-13 at 03:53 PM.. Reason: typo plus clarification
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Old 02-09-13, 09:40 AM   #24
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Hi Opiesche,

Looks really interesting but your blog has disappeared!

Wish I could see it!
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Old 02-09-13, 01:22 PM   #25
opiesche
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Should be working again now
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Old 03-26-13, 08:16 PM   #26
cbearden
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Hi Opiesche,
I ran across your post on the raspberry pi and it caught my attention. I'm working on building a house with a radiant floor in the slab. And I'm also using a pi to control/monitor everything that I can. I'm also using the same sensors you are, as they are super easy to setup and use, with the built-in I2C networking capabilities of the pi.
I have mine setup to record test temp measurements in my workroom for now. But I'm going to try to log temps from the following different locations in our slab/house:
1. multiple zone circuits within the slab
2. Underneath the slab, in the earth
3. inside the house, air temp
4. outside the house, air temp

I don't have much going yet on the web page side of this, but I'm still looking for different ideas/solutions out there for this.

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