New Plugin : Personal Thermostat

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Hello

I love Pimatic, it’s a very niece piece of software (even if it is written in CoffeeScript )
While building my system, I notice that I wanted a “smart” thermostat.

Thus, I wrote this plugin. It is a simple thermostat for Pimatic.
here are some of the functionnalities

• scheduling and manual modes
• Bang Bang and PID controlers
• Early On (coming)
• a simple but explicit UI

Follow this link for more information
link text

notice:

• the help file is written by a french
• I am new with CoffeScript, and I probably did a lot of mistakes…

Manu

@360manu
Whew! looking good at first glance.
but how is the device shown on a mobile? can you still recognize the timetable?

well, i can imagine this plugin for controlling floor heating systems, since they are kind of bangbang too, at least mine is. the valves are either fully opened or fully closed, controlled with a relay board.
since bangbang is only on/off switching, how does the plugin switch/control pid (when it’s ready implemented)? with valve postions of radiator thermostats (like max! thermostats eg.)?

Hello

It looks not so bad on my mobile.
The current program is blinking and you can see the different temperature.

For the controllers.
The bang bang uses a band of +/-0.2° to switch on or off.
The pid is more a time proportional controller. Every 30 min it decide a percentage between 0 and 100% of heating time.
Say 50%, then the heater will be on the first half of the period and off the second half.

Looking very good!
If this is finished, I coudl remove a lot of rules, nice

yes, pretty good. I’m also interested.

@360manu
Great Job!
Thats is what I was searching for here and even more. I have just tested it on my system and it works well so far.The timeline looks great on all my devices. Nice fade out when changing the mode to manu or off.

One thing I noticed is that the off-mode doesnt work for now. So when the thermostat is in off mode and the roomtemp is smaller as setPoint the heating turns on.

thx

@360manu Salut Manu
Thanks for your contribution, i am testing your plugin and find it promising.
Few things and proposal:

1. i am using the dark theme and the “target temperature” (the one between the + and - sign) is written in black color instead of white (as the others values such auto/manu)
2. could be great to add comfy and eco buttons as well (you can then easily switch to the mode you want), by pressing eco or comfy buttons i think that auto mode should be automatically disabled and turned to “manu”.
3. i find that currently buttons are too big, the original pimatic-thermostat display is better imho

As said previously your approach seems very good and could replace a good number of rules in my pimatic setup.

Thanks
Yves

One more thing, RF is not super reliable (collision, message lost…). Is it possible to repeat the last message actionHeatingOn/actionHeatingOff periodically?

@Yves911 I think this should be part of the executing plugin.
A periodical repeat function for Homeduino would be really nice. I will look what I can done for this.

Hello

Thanks for your feedback.
I updated the css & jade to take into account the theme.
(i didn’t notice that it was possible to change theme )

Regarding the “OFF” function : I am not sure about how it should work.
stop the system whatever the temperature or should it keep a minimal temp ?

Manu

Thanks @360manu, i can confirm that your changes on css & jade solve the issue with the UI.
Regarding the “off” button, i think that the best approach is to be able to maintain a minimal temperature (like this if someone want a real off he can simply ask to maintain a -40°C should be good )

@Icesory Yes there is already something that can repeat the message into the homeduino, but there is no way to select an interval for the repetition at the moment.

@360manu , do you plan to publish your plugin on npm (will be easier to install)?

Also it seems that we have an issue with rule execution, for example with:

"actionHeatingOn": "press ch-on-button and log \"Tadaon\" and press ch-on-button after 10 seconds and press ch-on-button after 20 seconds and press ch-on-button after 60 seconds and stop timerchauf and reset Dernier allumage after 1 second and start timerchauf after 2 second",

only the first part of the rule is executed ie:

press ch-on-button

@360manu do you plan to continue enhancement on this interesting plugin?

Hello

I published it on npm. seems to work.

Regarding the rule execution, I noticed this while testing.
I didn’t spent too much time on it.
Pimatic seems to parse the string and execute the first parsed rule.
I can’t find sample on how to execute the whole string.

Next steps regarding this plugin : early start
and correcting a stupid bug when 100% of the window is used : it stop and restart heating instead of doing nothing

@360manu thanks for the npm publishing, looks ok to me

I did not try your plugin yet, but from your wiki I see you use programs like “id” : 0, “id”: 1, and so on.
And then in your “timetable” you also use “programID”: 0 and “programID”: 1, etc.

Is it possible to use strings instead of numbers for the programs and programIDs?
like “id”: "night, “id”: “day_time”, “id” “evening”.
This to make it easy recognizable.
And I choose “day_time” to have it slightly colder compared to the “evening”. Same for all kind of other events.

Has someone tested this plugin with the max heating thermostats?

Are you planning on moving the program parameters out of the config ?

@koffienl said:

Are you planning on moving the program parameters out of the config ?

+1

My thermostat works with quite some rules. On the other hand: for Monday till Thursday I use one set of rules instead of a config option where I have to describe every day of the week, even though that would be copy&paste.
(I do like your idea of the thermostat having (currently) a proportional controller, which I now more or less, in a very basic, clumsy way, simulate in the dummy thermostat with rules)

My preference for rules lies in the simple fact that I can correct/update/add them “on the fly” while pimatic is running. Modifying the config requires me to login to my RPi, stop pimatic, modify the config, restart pimatic … and wait till pimatic is up again.
With rules you can do that in the gui, without restarting pimatic, with almost immediate response (whether it is correct or not)