solarbird | Okay then. It works! The wireless relay block works!

I am finally going to get remote control going on the fresh air intake vent – with expansion for three more. (And I have plans for those relays! Or at least ideas. Ideas. Yes. At least ideas.)

It’s not much to look at right now. I mean, it’s a little block of relays with a wifi transmitter on it. But it’s arduino programmable, which means that once you find all the firmware you need you can use it to turn things on and off using commands over your LAN. If you’ve done more than I have with Arduino, I’m sure it’s really quite straightforward – it’s not conceptually difficult for me, either, it’s just been incredibly fiddly given all the many stupid little things I didn’t already know.

The supplied firmware wants to talk to a cloud server in order to use it. Thankfully, Steve in Colorado said fuck that and wrote some replacement code, and it works. And now I’ve learned how to use curl for REST API calls, which I’ve never done before even though it’s like normally the first thing you do instead of the zillionth.

What this is going to let me do is roll actual temperature-driven air-exchange into Summer mode in my passive/air-exchange-driven HVAC assistance system – you know, the one where the core code is on my github. This has been a blocking issue for fucking ages, and I’ve just never had the combination of time and organisation to solve it.

But now it’s fucking solved, mate.

I still have some other things to do. This is a … holy shit I just realised something. I’ve been thinking I’d need to put in a power outlet down by the furnace eventually (which means pulling a permit) just for the stupid little 5v power adaptor, but I don’t, I can draw a little off the 24V DC provision for the current timer-driven system and use a buck converter to get it down to 5V for this thing.

And this after I went to all the trouble of wiring up a mains power 5V adaptor for this thing. Joke’s on me I guess lol – <BelaLugosiVoice>this simplifies everything!</BelaLugosiVoice> xD

Anyway. Once I have software control over the external fresh air intake, I can set it up so smoke mode is always closed, winter mode is… on a schedule I guess, since you always want some fresh air. I’ll have to write something to expose that as an interface clearly. But summer mode can finally be entirely temperature driven (with some kind of minimum exchange time again of course).

Or maybe if I get a CO2 sensor added into the system, I could drive it partly based on that. All year round. Or…

…or if I had an outside air quality sensor too then relative air quality could be a trigger. Whichever is cleaner! And if I can put in more intakes then I could have them on at least three sides of the building without having to open interior walls which means I could pull from the best available source temperature…

…! Lots to think about here. Finally!

Anyway. Um. Right. So I remember:

Turning relays on and off:
curl -X POST http://[boardIP]/api/relay/X/{on|off} where X is between 0 and 3 inclusive.

Turning all relays on and off:
curl -X GET http://[boardIP]/api/relay/all/{on|off}

Status of all relays:
curl -X GET http://[boardIP]/api/relay

This is going to be so fucking cool and I’m going to have it operational before summer. 😀

eta: am I aware of possible covid-19 applications? yes. i am. this is not a medical device. but yeah. i’m aware. 😀

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