Raspberry Pi thermostat - Building the hardware

This blog is about building my own thermostat with Raspberry Pi. This is part 1 where I explain the hardware. Part 2 talks about how I build the software that controls it.

What did I not like about the mercury thermostat?

I didn't like my old mercury-based thermostat for a couple reasons. First, the temperature fluctuation was pretty significant, up to 3 degrees C because mercury takes a while to react to the temperature change, Also I didn't like having to go to the living room to adjust the thermostat all the time.

Why did I not just use Ecobee or Nest? This was for fun & to learn how to build basic electronics using RPi ;)

Prerequisite

The interface to the HVAC is a simple single stage 4-wire control.

• heat resistive heat strips - white - not used
• fan - green
• cooling heat pump - orange
• power - red

Thank you /u/Nephilimi for the correction.

Basically, you just need to connect the power wire to what you want to turn on.

Connecting power to heat or cooling will heat/cool your coil.

Since I live in an apartment equipped with a heat pump, connecting power to heat pump will cool in summer and heat in winter.

Then you also need to run the fan for the air to circulate.

Parts needed

• Raspberry Pi - it can be any model really, but you want wifi for remote control.
• You need 3v, 5v, GND, and 4 GPIO pins minimum. 7 more for a 1602 display.
• Soldering equipments (example)
• Lots (10~20) of female to male jumper cables (example)
• Wires - I just used a 22 gauge wire
• Prototyping board (example)
• 3 x 2.2k and 3 x 10k Resistors
• 3 x 2n2222 NPN transistors
• DHT11 digital temperature & humidity sensor
• Minimum 3 channel relay (this is what I used)
• A 1602 display, if you want to display status also. It's named 1602 because it displays 2 rows of 16 characters.

Circuit

Here's the schematic for the core parts:

Solid lines denote where I had to use a wire. Dotted lines denote where I didn't have to use a separate wire thanks to either the board or existing wires.

Pins

P1 ~ P4 denote any free GPIO pins.

• 3.3v to power DHT11.
• 5v to power the relay.
• P1 communicates with DHT11 (both read/write).
• P2~P4 controls the three relay outputs.

Communicating with DHT11

DHT11 needs only one data pin because it both handles input and output through the same pin.

Controlling the relay

This was the only non-straightforward part that required a bit of thinking. When the relay is powered, the switches are simply disconnected. In order to 'close' (or, connect) the switch, you need to drain the current from the relay pins.

This is where the NPN transistor helps. It has 3 parts: base (B), current (C) and emitter (E). Electricity flows from C to E, only if voltage is applied on B.

In this case, C accepts current from the relay, but it doesn't let it go through E unless B has voltage. And we control the voltage by setting the line high from the Rpi.

So in my circuit, asserting P1 high connects power to heat. P2 and P3 controls fan and cooling respectively.

Finished hardware

Here's a ghetto looking finished thermostat in action:

Due to my lack of any real hardware skills, I could not put together in a more polished way.

What's next?

Check out the part 2 for the software that runs this thermostat.

tmux.conf with clipboard integration & extra features

I have been using the terminal multiplexer tmux for almost two years now, but I never used its mouse support. The big reason was that it messed up the native terminal copy-paste support.

I spent some time reading the tmux(1) man page, and finally got something working that's comparable to gui terminal emulators like gnome-terminal.

Nice things I added here:

• Copy mode selection with keyboard/mouse will copy into the clipboard, rather than just the tmux buffer.
• Right click to paste from the clipboard.
• Middle click on the window label to close a window.
• Double click on any window label to open a new window.
• Drag to re-order windows.

For those who are not familiar with tmux terminology, a tmux "window" is comparable to a browser "tab".

Here's the relevant tmux.conf parts annotated (my actual tmux.conf is here):

#!tmuxsh
# Enable mouse support.
set -g mouse on
# Middle click on the window label to kill it
# "=" is apparently a macro for the "selected window number" but only for 
# a certain set of commands.
bind-key -n MouseUp2Status kill-window -t=
# Drag to re-order windows
bind-key -n MouseDrag1Status swap-window -t=
# Double click on the window list to open a new window
bind-key -n DoubleClick1Status new-window

## Clipboard integration (only applicable when you have an X server running)

# Selection with mouse should copy to clipboard right away, in addition to the default action.
# Unbind the default action first.
unbind -n -Tcopy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane
bind -Tcopy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-selection-and-cancel\; run "tmux save-buffer - | xclip -i -sel clipboard > /dev/null"
# Copy mode copy should also copy it to the clipboard as well.
unbind -Tcopy-mode-vi Enter
bind -Tcopy-mode-vi Enter send -X copy-selection-and-cancel\; run "tmux save-buffer - | xclip -i -sel clipboard > /dev/null"
# Right click to paste from the clipboard
# If you like middle click better, change MouseDown3Pane to MouseDown2Pane for middle click.
unbind-key MouseDown3Pane
bind-key -n MouseDown3Pane run "tmux set-buffer \"$(xclip -o -sel clipboard)\"; tmux paste-buffer"

A few interesting things to note:

• The equals sign (=) in kill-window is a macro for the selected window number. But, it only works with specific commands, in an unescaped form. You can't do confirm-before "kill-window -t=". Don't waste your time trying to get it working.
• You must redirect xclip output into /dev/null, or tmux will hang (Relevant SO link).
• Also, If you are not using the vi key binding, all the un/binds with copy-mode-vi in it, needs to be replaced with copy-mode and their respective key binding. The default tmux key binding is actually hard-coded in their source code.
• Notably, this seems to work pretty well on the latest release of Windows 10 Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL (Wow, what a mouthful name!). Just run an X server like Xming and your clipboard will integrate with the Windows clipboard. Now I can use tmux full-time on Windows.

What can be improved:

• Disable the clipboard integration if X is not available. Since I always work with X, I didn't think this was useful.
• It does not select a word like on double click.
• Right after selection, it exits the copy-mode. It's kind of jarring.

Screenshot (well.. it doesn't look any different with mouse support)

San Francisco Trip Part 2 - MOAH

Part 1 is here.

We dropped by a small house museum called the Museum of American Heritage (MOAH) on the way to Stanford University. I wasn't sure what to expect but it turned out pretty good. A pinball exhibition was ongoing when we were there so that was fun to play with. And there were many interesting old gadgets. A volunteer named Jim was guiding us throughout the visit.

Ever wondered why pinball is named so? Well, when they first made it, it was literally a bunch of pins and a ball, no flappers or anything else. Hence the name "pinball". The earlier machines didn't require too much skill.

Jim the volunteer told us is that quite a few pinball machines had nice backglass arts that expressed many progressive social ideas for the time, like female astronauts. Supposedly, those backglasses are more valuable than the pinball machines themselves.

The Intertype machine made typesetting dramatically faster. At the backside of the machine, there is a cylinder of molten lead. As you type on the machine, the moulds for the letters you type fall into the tray in front of you. Then as you "flush" the current line, the molten lead is cast into types that you can use to publish newspapers faster than ever.

This machine helped the invention of daily newspapers. The machine was very expensive so people came up with various ways to keep it busy 24/7. One such way was to typeset a national newspaper earlier in the day, then to typeset a local newspaper later in the day (*I think this is kind of similar to how earlier computers were all time-sharing systems; Computers were very expensive and valuable back then*).

Unfortunately, I didn't really get to see it running live. They stopped running it live after many parents expressed concerns about their kids (at the museum) being exposed to lead fumes and all.

San Francisco Trip Part 1

I was visiting San Francisco from June 1 to 7. Here are some pictures I took.

It's nice and warm when the sun is up but it gets really cold as soon as you are in the shade. Ocean wind, I guess. In general, you need to wear a t-shirt and carry a thick sweater to wear in case it gets cold.

I liked seeing many old 80's cars in SF.

The city is also incredibly hilly.

There were many tasty mexican joints as well. A lot more common than the Chinese restaurants in Toronto.

I'll post more later.

Due - my favorite iPhone to-do app

Due is my most favorite todo app. I got it for free from Starbucks but I would totally pay for it. Here's why:

It does not let you forget a to-do item

The built-in iOS reminder app reminds you about a to-do item once, but never again. I often forget about a to-do because I don't check the notification area that often. Due will just set off a new notification every 5 minutes, until you either mark it done, or snooze it. You just can't ignore it even when the phone is in your pocket.

There were many times where this "nagging" behavior really forced me to work on important things instead of forgetting them.

Marking it done, or snoozing it is also easy but that's not too different from the built-in app.

Super easy due date/time entry

The entry UI is optimized for entering due dates quickly. You can tap to pick a pre-set, but customizable time of day, or add a time interval. You can even type the relative dates as you would talk to Siri.

On the other hand, the built-in reminder app has no way to set a relative (e.g., "in 50 days" instead of "Jan 25, 2015") due date in the UI. You must talk to Siri to do it which a no-go in a meeting.

Auto-import from the built-in app

The app is capable of importing the built-in app reminders so you can easily move from the built-in app to Due. There is also automatic import-and-delete feature so you can keep using Siri for setting reminders.