I’m building a home automation project which connects a Raspberry Pi to control my central heating. I wasn’t particularly happy ripping out all the existing controls, and wanted to piggyback onto them.. which helps if the Pi ever fails (I’ve still got the old controls to fall back on).
I also didn’t want to mess with the existing heating control board, so bought a duplicate unit (British Gas UP2) from eBay for about £12.. I can perfect the project on that, and install it when I’m ready.
This set of videos goes through each step of the project.. starting off with opening the control board, an overview of what I want to do, and testing out the changes.
Opening up the Control Panel
This was a bit tricky.. it wasn’t quite obvious which plastic clips needed pushing in to pull the board out.. if you were doing this on your actual panel (not an eBay-bought duplicate) then this video should help work out what you need to do to get into it without damaging anything.
Project Overview
Next up, I’ll quickly go over what I intend to do to piggyback onto the control board. There’s a project here which did exactly what I wanted to do. He’s not using a PiFace 2 like I intend to use, and he wants to be able to control the hot water as well, but everything else is the same.
Safety First – Masking off the High Voltage Area
In this second video, I’ll show how I’m masking off the high voltage area of the board to make it a bit safer when I’m testing things out. Obviously most of the time the board is off, but this helps keep things safer when it is on without the cover.
Identifying Solder Points
Luckily this blog gave me a good starting point, but it wasn’t clear where to get the status of the central heating.. I used a multimeter to find a spot which changed voltage when the system was on, and this diagram shows you what I found;
Soldering
Since I only needed 4 wires for this project (2 for the switch, and 2 for the system state), I took an old USB cable, cut the ends off, stripped the wires and soldered it to the board without much trouble.
Soldering Complete!
This shows the control board after the soldering has been completed.. it’s pretty simple soldering; the only tricky part was finding the points to connect to for the system state (on/off). I’ve stuck down some of the wires so that they don’t catch or get stuck underneath the control boards buttons.
Testing the Wiring
Now that I’ve done the soldering, I’m testing out the wiring.. seeing whether connecting the two wires for the switch turns the central heating on, and when it is on, whether we get voltage on the other two wires to indicate the system state.
Controlling from Software
I’ve now hooked it up to the Pi Face 2 board, which can be controlled with a few lines of Python to simulate a button press, and detect the state of the system. It wasn't strictly necessary to use a Pi Face 2.. I just happened to have one that I wanted to use in a project. One disadvantage of the Pi Face 2 was that it can't talk to a 1-wire temperature sensor, so I ended up soldering on a Pi Wingman to give me easy access to the unused GPIO pins.
With these basics in place, the rest of the control software can be written to do scheduling, bring in temperature readings, and allow the system to be controlled remotely.
Software Architecture
One of the early design decisions for the Raspberry Pi powered heating controller was to have the Pi secured behind a firewall without direct access to it from the Internet. What I decided to do was have a set of simple PHP web pages on a remote web host that you can access from anywhere, and the Pi control server talks to that web host to send/receive data.
What I didn’t want was for the Pi to run a web server that ends up getting compromised & having the run of my home network.
The Pi server and remote webspace need to be paired with an access key. Anyone accessing the remote site needs the correct access key to be able to control the system.. and the level of control is limited by the API we’ll put in place.. i.e. remote clients won’t have direct access to your internal network via an open port on your home router.
Of course, you could actually host the ‘remote’ part of this set up on your Pi and use port forwarding; the architecture allows for both types of access. The access key is still needed to control the system, but you’ll be more vulnerable to attacks on your Apache/PHP installation & need to keep up-to-date with software patches to help ensure your system is secure.
I've made a fair amount of progress on a relatively simple set of scripts + PHP that makes this possible.. this video shows how it looks so far. The control part isn't hooked up, but it is able to accept a command from the front-end and pass it to the back end scripts for actioning. The temperature logging is working nicely.
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