Latest Hacking in the Mape's household

[mapes]

So after hooking up some basic X10 devices I thought I'd go look into other home automation remote control stuff. My house is a multi level town house. The thermostat is on the lowest level. This kinda sucks cause the temp upstairs is way hot and on occasion my wife asks me to "go downstairs and turn on the heat". Since I was familiar with scripting automating X10 I looked into some x10 controlled thermostats. So what I ended up getting was a TXB16 unit made by Residential Control Systems plus a remote temperature sensor to mount upstairs. The unit has two parts. The thermostat part, as normal where you can dial in the temp or turn on the fan or heat (or cool if equipped). The second part a control unit splices in between the thermostat and the furnace. Beside the thermostats and furnace leads the the control part also has an X10 module with a lead. So now I can wireless issue a temperature setting command and turn on the heat from anywhere in the house. I can also schedule the heat to go off in the morning at a certain time with a certain temp. Or I can go to a web page and issue any of these command. So without further ado here are the pics

Remote temp sensor

The thermostat part

My HVAC closet



Little bit of info. The grey box is the control unit. The power strip below it has the RF receiver for X10 commands and the X10 module for sending control data from the x10 power line to the control unit.


One last pic. This is the web page where I can control anything from anywhere in the world....


Thats why I havn't been on the server...I was putting holes in my walls

[Gimmie2]

dude its people like you who came up with Google, IE, e-mail, and Velcro.
Looking for quick permanent fixes to all of the "little things"

[Savage_Hobo]

Wow.. Very cool. How long did the whole project take you?

[juneau]

Nice work there Mapes. Making your own Bill Gates house are we?

[Zantheus]

Nice work Mapes....a Mansion I finished doin at the end of '08 was 100% Wireless aswell... Temp, Lighting, Security, Oven, Irrigation...u name it. His Rack of gear in the basement was worth like 500k. Its amazing how lazy society has become over the years

[mapes]

Lazy......WTF I had to cut holes in my walls, route cables, Learn about furnaces,learn how to program the thing, patch...texture...and paint the walls....

[Hammy]

To solve the climate issues in the multi-level- you put a fan above the staircase to either push down or pull up the air

(so that the thermo knows the "real" temp in the house, push down in the winter pull up in the summer- there is a switch on all cieling fans that allows it to rotate clockwise or counter clockwise- and the remote driven ones allow you to do this by remote too )

The next trick is that you close all the doors on all the rooms upstairs, if you have internal heating you want to close the vents in those rooms).

effectively, it reduces the square footage of the house and enables you to heat the condo more effectively.

[Zantheus]

LOL I didnt mean the proccess of doing it...what you did is fine...I was more stating that in regards to what the homeowner did that I built the house and how technology allows ppl to be lazy Ie: turning their oven on from their phone or computer, etc

[WalkinTarget]

I always enjoy a Mapes 'look what I hacked together' post !! Nice job, and I'm glad you have the X-10 gear up and running !

[mapes]

Savage... well It took a bit of time. I started last week and punched two holes. I then had the the wiring hooked up where you could operate the thermostat in a manual mode. After that it was weird cause the original installers had not installed my original thermostat correctly. So I had to figure that out. Then everything fell into place. Over all it took me over a weeks time mostly a couple of hours at night. It was kinda hard cause I'd make some progress and then have to revert back to where my wife could use it. I already had a pair of cat5 ran in an area near the thermostat. However one of the runs was bad. So I used the bad run to pull two new runs. One run to replace the bad cat5 network jack and the other for the upstairs temperature sensor. Then it was just a matter of hooking up the sensor wires to the thermostat, the original thermo wires to the new thermo and the control unit. Then a short run from the control unit to the furnace. I had to place a power strip in the HVAC closet cause that outlet is on it's own leg which is outta phase with the rest of the house. Which means it won't receive x10 commands. So the power strip provides power and a data bus from the X10 remote radio receiver box (thing with antenna) and the HVAC x10 module. The server side I already had kinda setup. It's a serial dongle that transmits the radio codes which the x10 receiver picks up and transmits over the power line(powerstrip) to the HVAC x10 module. Using Linux there's a bunch of open source software to control everything and I just use the UNIX scheduler known as cron to kick off scripts at certain times. Then I had to go and fix everything. Actually I need to mend one of my cieling holes tonight cause I did a bad patch job....

To solve the climate issues in the multi-level- you put a fan above the staircase to either push down or pull up the air

(so that the thermo knows the "real" temp in the house, push down in the winter pull up in the summer- there is a switch on all cieling fans that allows it to rotate clockwise or counter clockwise- and the remote driven ones allow you to do this by remote too )

The next trick is that you close all the doors on all the rooms upstairs, if you have internal heating you want to close the vents in those rooms).

effectively, it reduces the square footage of the house and enables you to heat the condo more effectively.

So Hammy what we do now is we shut all of the doors to rooms upstairs we're not using. Except the computer room.....It produces a lot of heat so thats ok. If we need to heat downstairs we have a thick curtain we draw across the entry to the stairs trapping most of the heat downstairs. Very low tech but, seems to work well.

The cool thing is the box has status led's. You can actually see a an LED turn on when the heat or fan turns on.

Something that hilarious is after 12 years living in this place I finally realized that you don't need to turn on the fan with the heat.....doh

[Mobojo]

Mapes, you never cease to amaze me. Next you will put motors in the windows so you can go online and open them before you come home.

Im also sad you blacked out that website, that would have been a lot of fun!

[mapes]

Mapes, you never cease to amaze me. Next you will put motors in the windows so you can go online and open them before you come home.

Im also sad you blacked out that website, that would have been a lot of fun!

Puhlease!!! I'm more secure than just hiding my webpage. I have apache 2 doing digest user authentication

[Mobojo]

You sure you dont want me as a back up for you incase you need to change the temp but cant get to a computer?

[smawhirho]

That's pretty good.
Good post. I appreciate it
Many thanks to ur post. I love it.
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