Aircon Controls Adapter & Interface design

WebThings
#1

I am really only experimenting with the capabilities right now, but one of the things I would like to do is to override the built-in switching of the fan blower in response to the aircon’s own temperature sensor and instead based on mine.

So I have the sensors and data, and I have the IR blaster that sends IR commands to the aircon system, I can execute that from the console using bash and it works just fine.

But I can’t really think what kind of controller / interface I would use to send data to the aircon, any suggestions ??

I guess that I just need a series of buttons to increase fan speed, slow it down, switch on and off and increase and reduce the temperature.

I know that aircon IR packets are large and contain all settings in a single blast, I dont need help with that :slight_smile:

But what kind of adapter would I need to create ??

#2

Hmm, good question. The Thermostat capability assumes that you’re controlling a thermostat where you set a TargetTemperatureProperty and it automatically switches a HeatingCoolingProperty to reach that target temperature.

It sounds like what you want to do is to create a thermostat split across two separate physical devices - with the temperature sensor in one device and the cooling switch and fan speed on another.

Assuming you can override the direct connection between the air conditioner’s built-in thermostat and its cooling state, you could represent the system as two separate web things (e.g. a TemperatureSensor and an OnOffSwitch and/or MultiLevelSwitch). This would probably require separate adapter add-ons for the two separate devices.

You could then create rules in the rules engine to switch the cooling state when the temperature of the temperature threshold reaches a certain threshold.

Alternatively you could create a single adapter add-on which communicates with both devices and represents them as a single Thermostat web thing.

Which approach makes the most sense may depend slightly on how you communicate with your temperature sensor and whether that can be used with an existing adapter add-on.