Space Heater into Thermostat (SHiT)
Winter 2012-2013
Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of this project, but I thought it was cool enough to share.
During the frigid California winter of 2013, we were trying to conserve energy and money by not turning on the central heating and just using space heaters. I would turn mine on before I went to sleep, but would always wake up sweating and parched from my heater being on too long. I realized that I wasn't saving any energy and was actually wasting it on unwanted heat.
I decided I wanted to give my space heater some really simple "bang-bang" type control, just turn on when below a certain temperature and turn off above a certain temperature. I used an arduino to communicate with a TMP102 temperature sensor via I2C (arduino's "Wire" api). The sensor allows the user to set high and low temperature registers. It then sets an interrupt pin low whenever it goes above the high value or below the low value. The arduino watches the interrupt pin and controls a servo to flip the switch on the space heater.
In addition to this, I serially communicate with matlab to output a live plot on my laptop of the current room temperature with the setpoint overlayed. Unfortunately I did not take any screenshots or pictures, but I've posted the working code for both matlab and arduino. The servo was mounted to the side of the heater using magnets and worked very well.
During the frigid California winter of 2013, we were trying to conserve energy and money by not turning on the central heating and just using space heaters. I would turn mine on before I went to sleep, but would always wake up sweating and parched from my heater being on too long. I realized that I wasn't saving any energy and was actually wasting it on unwanted heat.
I decided I wanted to give my space heater some really simple "bang-bang" type control, just turn on when below a certain temperature and turn off above a certain temperature. I used an arduino to communicate with a TMP102 temperature sensor via I2C (arduino's "Wire" api). The sensor allows the user to set high and low temperature registers. It then sets an interrupt pin low whenever it goes above the high value or below the low value. The arduino watches the interrupt pin and controls a servo to flip the switch on the space heater.
In addition to this, I serially communicate with matlab to output a live plot on my laptop of the current room temperature with the setpoint overlayed. Unfortunately I did not take any screenshots or pictures, but I've posted the working code for both matlab and arduino. The servo was mounted to the side of the heater using magnets and worked very well.
shit_interrupts.ino | |
File Size: | 2 kb |
File Type: | ino |
data_logging.m | |
File Size: | 1 kb |
File Type: | m |