I might go WIFI control with boiler

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SIERRADMAX

Feeling the Heat
Jan 13, 2011
300
RI
My house has wifi thermostats which the wife and I use the function quite often from our phones. We've been contemplating revamping our security system with a honeywell system that uses camera's and also has the feature to control circuits via wifi switch. Which leads me to the thought of one camera being positioned to monitor my boilers display and using the switch to control the fan remotely. Kind-of an all-in-one app that can control the thermostats, have live video of the boiler's control panel, and be able to kill the fan to choke the fire.

Anyone have similar?
 
I have something kinda similar ;-)

It's really nice to be able to check on things when you're away. We just did a trip to visit relatives, and I was able to check in and see that I had enough heat in storage to bring the house most of the way back up to temp before we got home. Very high WAF (That's Wife Approval Factor if you haven't run into that acronym before - very important concept to keep in mind when planning heating systems).
 
I use a Rocks BBQ controller, it's for a BBQ but it works great, I found out about the vesta controller after the fact. But either way for $350 I got into the rocks bbq it is wifi and I can check temps and shut fan off, but it does not control the temp. I use a Johnson 419 controller and the rocks as a second high temp cut out plus a thermodisk cut out if all fails. Nothing like checking and making sure it is all ok when you are away. My wife thinks I am crazy on how much I check the boiler:)
 
So I went with the https://www.ubnt.com/ MFi controller. I am not really a computer nerd and it took me a little to figure things out but all in all I am happy with it. So the Mfi Controller is WIFI or LAN connected to your router. On the MFI controller you can add two Ethernet plug type sensors( I have a Current sensor) and you can use the 3rd port to hook up a different types of sensors. I went with a PT100 temp sensor. So in my basement I have the MFI controller mounted to my board the has the Primary/secondary piping system for my boiler. I then placed the current sensor on the fan wire for my forced hot air blower. I placed the PT100 temp sensor in a probe well that I have on my Primary loop. I can watch the boiler temp go up and down on a graph and I can see when the fan runs and for how long etc on a graph. The software from UBNT is free. The Mfi controller cost about $65 off Ebay, the current sensor was $13 off Ebay and the PT100 sensor was $15. Now you can add on a Mfi 'mPower' which you can also control from the same software which is just a 120 volt plug that you plug whatever you want to control into. The software does have to run on a 'server' so that you can access it 24/7. I bought a $50 netbook off craigslists and leave that running 24/7 so that I can access the info whether I am at home or away. So far it has been great.
 
It occurred to me that if you already have wifi thermostats and hydronic distribution, you could turn things on and off using the unused 24v connection for a non-existent furnace fan.
 
So I went with the https://www.ubnt.com/ MFi controller. I am not really a computer nerd and it took me a little to figure things out but all in all I am happy with it. So the Mfi Controller is WIFI or LAN connected to your router. On the MFI controller you can add two Ethernet plug type sensors( I have a Current sensor) and you can use the 3rd port to hook up a different types of sensors. I went with a PT100 temp sensor. So in my basement I have the MFI controller mounted to my board the has the Primary/secondary piping system for my boiler. I then placed the current sensor on the fan wire for my forced hot air blower. I placed the PT100 temp sensor in a probe well that I have on my Primary loop. I can watch the boiler temp go up and down on a graph and I can see when the fan runs and for how long etc on a graph. The software from UBNT is free. The Mfi controller cost about $65 off Ebay, the current sensor was $13 off Ebay and the PT100 sensor was $15. Now you can add on a Mfi 'mPower' which you can also control from the same software which is just a 120 volt plug that you plug whatever you want to control into. The software does have to run on a 'server' so that you can access it 24/7. I bought a $50 netbook off craigslists and leave that running 24/7 so that I can access the info whether I am at home or away. So far it has been great.

I'll look into this. I've been down the road with commercial remote monitoring chilled water and HW systems using bacnet & belimo valve actuators but this gets expensive. I like to use the "KISS" method. "keep it simple stupid". With Honeywell Connect, I should be able to control the t-stats, camera, & boiler fan in one app.
 
Tying the bits together is always the hard part.

I've looked into a lot of this over the years. My observation is that there are great industrial solutions if cost is not an issue and you have an engineer on hand. However, there isn't much our there in the gap between industrial systems on the high end and discrete single-purpose controls on the low end. In a lot of cases, simple monitoring is enough, and BBQ thermometers or cheap dataloggers are a good solution.

If you want to control things, though, I start to worry about end-to-end system reliability. What needs to be working in order to have adequate safety?

Being an aerospace guy, I like things that are self-contained, simple, hard-wired, and fail-safe. Depending on Internet access or on a computer with moving parts is a non-starter for me, and I'm suspicious of wireless for mission-critical control functions.

I'd also like to be able to use any sensor or control device out there. Unfortunately, almost everything uses proprietary or at least undocumented protocols. Ever try to get an actual schematic of even a simple Taco zone controller?

For another example, the MFi hardware is nice, but we've never found an actual description of the signals / protocol between their sensors and their port. Proprietary, as far as I can tell.

After a lot of hassle, we got an agreement with Insteon to support their devices, but their documentation is almost non-existent.

Our best result so far has been Monnit - they have a wide range of 900mHz wireless sensors, and we are able to integrate all of them. Not as cheap as MFi, though.

We made the decision to go open-source with our system, and a good many people (some of them on this forum) have built their own versions. I feel like that's the right approach, and it's allowed users to add their own hardware and software. We've recently added the Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi to the list of supported CPU platforms, and we have people adding their own software to do cloud-based data mining across multiple systems.

Unfortunately, we can't match the mass-produced made-in-China prices.....
 
Tying the bits together is always the hard part.

I've looked into a lot of this over the years. My observation is that there are great industrial solutions if cost is not an issue and you have an engineer on hand. However, there isn't much our there in the gap between industrial systems on the high end and discrete single-purpose controls on the low end. In a lot of cases, simple monitoring is enough, and BBQ thermometers or cheap dataloggers are a good solution.

If you want to control things, though, I start to worry about end-to-end system reliability. What needs to be working in order to have adequate safety?

Being an aerospace guy, I like things that are self-contained, simple, hard-wired, and fail-safe. Depending on Internet access or on a computer with moving parts is a non-starter for me, and I'm suspicious of wireless for mission-critical control functions.

I'd also like to be able to use any sensor or control device out there. Unfortunately, almost everything uses proprietary or at least undocumented protocols. Ever try to get an actual schematic of even a simple Taco zone controller?

For another example, the MFi hardware is nice, but we've never found an actual description of the signals / protocol between their sensors and their port. Proprietary, as far as I can tell.

After a lot of hassle, we got an agreement with Insteon to support their devices, but their documentation is almost non-existent.

Our best result so far has been Monnit - they have a wide range of 900mHz wireless sensors, and we are able to integrate all of them. Not as cheap as MFi, though.

We made the decision to go open-source with our system, and a good many people (some of them on this forum) have built their own versions. I feel like that's the right approach, and it's allowed users to add their own hardware and software. We've recently added the Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi to the list of supported CPU platforms, and we have people adding their own software to do cloud-based data mining across multiple systems.

Unfortunately, we can't match the mass-produced made-in-China prices.....
I am very sold on the Vest, I just have to get through this season. Save a few dollars and buy one, thanks for the input!
 
I am very sold on the Vest, I just have to get through this season. Save a few dollars and buy one, thanks for the input!
Not trying to sell you one, by the way - just explaining why we went the direction that we did - also reminding the techies out there that they can build their own if so inclined. I'd *like* to think we have a great solution, but there are plenty of options out there, and not everyone is motivated to obsess over their wood boilers as much as I do.
 
I'm obsessing. Just bought a RaspberryPi, plan to learn Python (did a lot of Basic and dBase programming 30 years ago), and see where the fun bring me ... Vesta?
 
I'm obsessing. Just bought a RaspberryPi, plan to learn Python (did a lot of Basic and dBase programming 30 years ago), and see where the fun bring me ... Vesta?
Pretty much the same path that led me here, except there was no Raspberry Pi when I started.

I've had the Vesta software running on a RasPi, but I never wrote any hardware I/O handlers for that platform. We now use the Beaglebone Black as the compute engine. Unfortunately, the I/O is pretty fragile and limited, so I had to design a board to provide ruggedized I/O in sufficient types and quantities. When it's all done, the Beaglebone is a pretty small part of it. See the board layout below.

pcb.png
 
I'm going to have to crawl very slowly to get back into this stuff. Are you sure that's not a Rembrandt rather than a photo?
 
I'm going to have to crawl very slowly to get back into this stuff. Are you sure that's not a Rembrandt rather than a photo?
That accursed board has almost 400 components on it. Routing it was a trip. We use one in a Vantage, and two in a Pro. It has 5.2V utility supply, protected 12V relay power supply, 5.000V reference supply, real-time clock, protected discrete inputs, high current discrete outputs, differential analog inputs, 4-20mA inputs, 4-20mA outputs, wireless sensor radio, 1 wire interface, RS-232, Modbus, pulse inputs, and a bunch of other miscellany.

If you're interested in 'roll your own', PM me and I'll send you the BitBucket (git) repository link. The code there compiles and runs on the Beaglebone (after a bunch of undocumented dependencies are satisfied), and probably wouldn't take much to get it running on the RasPi. I/O drivers are a different issue, but the Beaglebone example should be a good start.

Fair warning: it's all C, C++, and a smidgen of Javascript and PHP.
 
My nephew, a pro at computer science and computer forensics, has recommended Python as a very capable, well supported, many available libraries, program. What do you think.?
 
My nephew, a pro at computer science and computer forensics, has recommended Python as a very capable, well supported, many available libraries, program. What do you think.?
He may be a very knowledgeable computer tech, but did he ask (the mark of a true PRO) what you already know? If so, I'm surprised why he didn't suggest you speed up the crawl a bit by starting out with BBC Basic. If he scoffs at Basic, I'll just say that I've had a 50 year connection with that language, along with many others, and it just keeps on rolling along. Not knocking Python, and you could certainly switch to that the future. But why not pick up where you left off and get rolling much faster? And who knows - the old dinosaur might actually turn out to be all you ever need.
 
Programming languages are often a matter of taste and/or convenience. I started out in the NFCS with C because it's very efficient in an environment with limited resources. I could do more higher-level language code now, but C and C++ are also very good for driver-level code. I haven't done much with Python, but in other projects I've done a lot on the web interface side in PHP.

For the Vesta, the software architecture is based on independent processes that interact with data structures in shared memory. I haven't tried to develop an API for my shared memory structure in anything other than C/C++. Looks to be *very* painful in PHP, and I don't know about Python.
 
My first experience was with Basic in 1980-81. I then got DBase, moved to DBII, then DBIII, then Clipper. Python structure looks more like Clipper than Basic as I learned it. As evident my experience is mostly with databases. No experience with GUI programming. No programming after about 1993. Still use my Clipper bookkeeping program.
 
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