Posts made by KimmoHop

Or was the valve type RA That has z-wave actuator

Hi @OliverDog !

No update on valve front, it'll be either DIY or Danfoss wired actuator - there are no z-wave components for twa-k valve. I'm have been coding control possibility to current implementation, but all the time thinking affordable off-the-shelf systems or components. Heating control, while it could be -30degC outside, needs trustworthy system and maybe backup even then.

MySensors has been running quite well for two years now. After there was a fix for "fake" NRF24L01+ tranceivers, electricity blackouts have been #1 cause for no data. WLAN was stuck once and range between WLAN router and ESP wifi shield is poor. MySensors has been stuck once or twice after modding. No other errors as far as I can remember.

So, monitoring still (light blue and rose - heating circulation, bottom - outside, green and blue - inside)

I used tme.eu when I was in a hurry to get some RFM69s. Their transport costs 7,90€/75SEK but it's UPS/DHL (the package arrives to door in few days).
I also used one local small company, who has Arduino stuff (from ebay or Ali) and delivers it with small profit. It's a bit more expensive but also a lot faster and no surprise costs.

Finnish Posti did not proceed with similar extra costs, maybe they try to develop automatic systems to work with China packets, so ebay is usable here - untill future VAT and customs rules at least

@executivul Those look interesting valves, though not exactly what I'm looking for

@gohan I don't have zwave controller

I did a quick test. 1W seemed good point to start, 25 ohms to 5V. I took 4 100 ohm resistors and wound them parallel, and used 4xAA batteries to power them.
Too much heat 0.23A at 5.8V and the resistors were really hot. Burning hot to the skin, and IR thermometer got up to 80 degrees C, although it's measuring from bigger area. I'm afraid that so high temperature could damage bellow inside sensor. Same resistors in 2S2P give some 40 degrees C - closer but a bit too low

I'm planning to add MySensors control to radiators in water circulated central heating. Radiators have Danfoss valves and RA2000 sensors.

Electric (thermal wax) actuators can be had for 20-35€ each and they could be driven with either 230VAC (with simple SSR module) or with 24V, depending on model.
Given the cost (and to some extent, availability) of actuators, another possibility would be to heat cheat sensors by heating them with resistor(s), to make them think that the room is hotter and reduce actual temperature. I can live with "default" setting as max temp + controllable cooling.

Now for the questions part:

• has someone done that? Did it work?
• how to locate resistor(s)? Is below sensor enough, or must the resistor go inside the sensor to be effective?
• how much power would be enough? I think 9-12VDC would be available, so FET can easily drive 1-5W. I'm 150km away from radiators, so I can't test it right now...
• should I just stop tinkering and go with commercial actuators?

Though RF24 works quite well at my home, at remote location it's quite on/off. It can work for single measurement or one day or several days, and then have no data for a week. The gateway is running well, since it regularly contacts web server to get new set value(s) even on periods with no data.

This led me to suspect problem with RF24, and to order 15 RFM69 radios + level converters. Boy, are they laborious to solder together and to proto shield (no more jumper wires ) on top of Uno! I could make and then test 2 pieces in one day, with magnifying glasses and 3rd hand. Damn 2mm raster on RFM69!

If I can get RF24 working good enough, I'll stick with them. For good

Hi!
I have been working with simple heating control system. It will consist of

• control nodes (Uno + RF24) with temperature measurement, 2 relay outputs for aux heating devices and possibility to add external temp sensors (all DS1820)
• "serial" gateway (Mega2560 + RF24 + WiFi shield) to send measured values to web server and poll set value(s) from server (to control nodes). It also parses UTC time from HTTP response to update local time
• web server to collect and view data and keep set value(s)

The system is very much in WIP and monitoring-only-testing phase, but so far it looks promising. Though sometimes it looks like there are "golden" build environment configurations - that just work - and flaky transmissions and long black periods Hopefully MyS 2.2 with mixed ACK handling will work better than 2.1 and 2.1.1.

The server uses PHP, MySQL and Slim, with AngularJS and Google Charts on UI.

Oh, the purpose I want to monitor our "summer" house. Heating is by water circulating central heating and electric (read: not cheap). To be able to use air-to-air heat pump efficiently, it would be necessary to turn down single radiators (heat pump is primary heat source, and if it keeps temps high enough, radiator should be shut, using one of the relay outputs) and possibly use electric heaters as backup/reserve/extra heat (when temps go really low, like when it's really cold or heat pump is on de-ice sequence, using the second relay output).

For images, I may have to load them somewhere else and then link to them...

Just noticed, that MySensors 2.2 changed default RF24 CS pin on Mega2560 from pin 10 to pin 53 (SS) I could not find any reference to the change from 2.2 change log nor from pull request (722)... No wonder RF24 worked with 2.1.1 but not with 2.2 on M2560.
Contrary to instruction above, I wanted to continue with old pins (same as on Uno) and set the pins explicitly to MY_RF24_CE_PIN=9 & MY_RF24_CS_PIN=10. Now transport seems quite good (with combined HW and SW ack, static GW address, no routers)