12  Building a Novel Smart Thermostat

This document describes the motivation, objectives and initial ideas for Project #1 of the Spring 2023 edition of the course. The projects are the cornerstone of the course, as they are what motivates all of the material that is discussed during the semester.

The project’s goal is to develop a computer system (hardware and software) that can interact with heating, ventilation and/or air conditioning (HVAC) equipment in a residential or commercial building, in order to enact “smarter” control of these, where “smart” here means that the new controller provides some cost, energy and/or productivity gains over the older one. One of the lowest-level controllers in modern HVAC systems consists of a (digital) thermostat and a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller. Thus, the goal of this project is to create a computer system that can be used to replace an existing digital thermostat and increase the efficiency (energy, cost or productivity) of the building.

There are various examples of projects (and commercially avaiable products) that do just this. If you are curious to know more about them, a good place to start would be this (growing) list of links:

• ThermOS, with code here.
• DIY Thermostat with a Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi as a touchscreen thermostat
• Building a Thermostat with the Raspberry Pi
• Programmable Thermostat with the Raspberry Pi
• PiTherm
• Raspberry Pi as a thermostat
• ThermTerm