saberrg / borc

Battery-Operated Radiator Control - Second generation radiator control

BORC

Battery-Operated Radiator Control

A low-power automatic radiator control that is designed to retrofit on steam radiators that use Honeywell's T104A1040 Zone Valve Operator uses LowPowerLab's DualOptiboot bootloader for the ATmega1284P.

This repo contains:

• PCB design files and schematic for control board, power board and LED board for the BORC.
• Firmware for a low-power radiator control node
• Logger script to get real-time current data from the BORC

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Dependencies

To compile the firmware, Arduino IDE 1.8.19 is needed. Newer IDE versions are not verfied to work.

The firmware requires the following libraries installed:

• RFM69
• SPIFlash
• LowPower
• Adafruit PWM Servo Driver Library

The firmware also requires the Moteino Board definitions installed following this guide.

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Logger script

The logger script enables capturing current usage data over the serial port on the BORC.

Prerequisites:

• pip
• Pyserial

Run:

Run the script using the following command over a command line interface:

For Windows:

python logger.py -c COM15 -n filename

For MacOS/Linux:

python logger.py -c /dev/ttyusb0 -n filename

Notes:

• Change python to python3 if using Python version 3.
• Change filename to something referencing the test to keep the generated files organized. The current date/time is automatically added to the filename.
• The script automatically adds the .csv extension to the filename, so there's no need to include it in the arguments when running it.
• For Windows, go to device manager and find the COM port of the BORC under "Ports" section and replace COM15 in the command above.
• For MacOS or Linux, use ls /dev/tty.* command in terminal to find the COM port of the BORC, and replace /dev/ttyusb0 above with the full path of the COM port.
• Use -h command to bring a help menu (eg. python logger.py -h).
• If the servo doesn't move in some areas, you can adjust the default min and max limits to the particular servo installed. The default limits should be set to where the servo is guaranteed to move, and beyond these limits, the servo will not respond. Typical min limit for a 270° servo is 3600 and max limit is 3950. You can increase or decrease these limits to see where the servo being tested begins to move.
• Default baudrate for the BORC is 115200. If updated, make sure to update the same in the logger script.