Raspberry Pi Thermostat Instructions

Here are some details on how I put together my Raspberry Pi thermostat.



My apartment's thermostat uses a very simple mechanism to control the heater:



Connecting the red wire to the white wire turns on the heater. Near the center of the thermostat is a glass vial containing some mercury. If the vial tilts to the right the mercury creates a connection between the wires. I attached the two black wires on the bottom and use the Raspberry Pi to control the connection between the wires. The original thermostat remains fully functional: the heater will turn on if either the Raspberry Pi or the original thermostat signal it to turn on.



Materials used:

• Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
• USB Wifi
• Pi Cobbler Plus
• Power supply
• SD card
• Songle SRD-05VDC-SL-C Relay
• Breadboard
• Wires

The relay module controls the connection between the two heater wires. GPIO output from the Raspberry Pi can turn the connection on/off. The connection is off by default - even when the Raspberry Pi is powered off. I SSH into the Raspberry Pi to control the GPIO pin over the Internet.

Raspberry Pi Thermostat

I connected a Raspberry Pi up to the heater in my apartment. Now I can control the heater over the Internet.

Update: more details posted here.

An Update on Baka

[previous post]

Although Baka Analytics has stopped updating, Baka is still alive. The occasional gaps in the data were due to Baka chewing through the wire which connects the magnetic sensor to the Raspberry Pi (which I had to fix several times). The outage since September 12 is a more serious issue: all of the USB ports on the Raspberry Pi stopped working. I think Baka caused this by urinating on the Raspberry Pi (which was stored next to his cage). I have ordered a replacement Raspberry Pi to use on another project, so it is unlikely I will restart Baka Analytics.

Baka's record was running 17.31 kilometers in a single night. In total Baka was recorded running 682.29 kilometers.

Metaball Go

Today I worked on a small HTML5 project: http://www.byronknoll.com/go.html

This is the board game Go rendered using metaballs.