@stephenmhall what I still don't get is the purpose of the Neopixel ! what's for? what are you displaying with that led wheel?

@sebgudek
At the very minimum you need to buy a Raspberry Pi (around £ 30 ), a charger and an SD card and follow the instructions on www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ to install Raspbian on the Raspberry PI, then follow Stephen's instructions on the file installation.txt:
https://github.com/stephenmhall/PiHeating/blob/master/PiHeating/src/heating/installation.txt

You need to know a little bit how to work on Linux do to so. If you have even a very limited linux experience, the instructions are enough, although they are very very condensed.

When the code is running you can control it simply with a browser within the same network, again this is explained in installation.txt . It is in fact nicer (and easier) to use this interface than the MAX! Cube application, although they are not exactly the same thing and you still need the official application (I believe) to set the weekly program and other things.

@Lawrence-Helm they are not noisy to me but you can hear them if there's silence in the house. Noise it's very subjective of course. It sounds like a small motor turning for say 3 or 4 seconds. Once a week when they run the de-scale program, but you can set it at any point in the week. At that time they make the same noise, but for a longer time.

Stephen the work you have done is fantastic !

This is very useful for everybody using a MAX! Cube, regardless of the Vera. As you can read in the comments (and on other sites) the main missing feature with the MAX! Cube is a direct link with the boiler, in order to have the boiler running only when at least one valve requires it.
I strongly suggest you to work in this direction, and provide example on how to switch on/off the boiler from the Raspberry Pi directly (either wired or wireless link) when needed.
Also, you instructions in installation.txt worked fine for me but it took me a while to find them and "decode" them. First I would suggest to explicitly point to that file from README.md and second to explain what's the NeoPixel thing. I still don't know, I just assumed it could work without it but I wonder what it is.

For those of you still wonder whether the MAX! Cube is worth its money: yes yes yes! I've never found such a good solution for that price! It gave me all I need and, with Stephen's code, it's more than I can dream of.