Live in a Rental? This Smart Home Heating System Won't Cause Any Damage
A removable system that can be used for automatic heating control via schedule or Alexa.
Andy Bradford wanted a way to program his heating system with complex timings or his smartphone. Normally, this would involve something like a Nest or Hive device, but as he lives in a rental, any smart heating solution would need to be removable and not cause any damage to the system. The interesting thing here is that his heating system does feature some automation, in the form of an electromechanical ring that’s set with plastic pegs to turn the thermostat on or off at designated times.
The control spindle can be adjusted manually via a screwdriver slot as well, giving him a way to further automate the process. His new unit uses a stepper motor with a custom ‘screwdriver’ tip to rotate it, powered by an Adafruit Feather Huzzah ESP8266 board. To align everything, he made a table-like structure and bracket to support the motor, plus another bracket to keep the assembly close enough to the ring control. There was also, of course, a bit of fiddling to get everything to work correctly.
With those bits worked out, he connected the system to Adafruit IO and added a few LEDs on the device to help accommodate for latency. IFTTT’s clock trigger is now used to schedule things and he even connected it with Alexa to accept voice commands.
Be sure to check out the system demo in the video below!