Thermostat

November 2013 - December 2013

When I was growing up, our family had a workshop separate from our house. We remodeled it and added heating and internet. In the winter, we would want it to be warm before we went out to work, but the thermostat was in the workshop, not the house. To make it easier to turn on the heat, we decided to make a web interface for our thermostat. I used a Minilab DAQ board to read the current temperature into the computer and to control the thermostat's relay.

To handle requests, I had a service running in the background on my computer that would read data from a queue to see if there were any new requests. I made a webpage to control the thermostat just by adding commands to the queue. The webpage used PHP to read from the queue the temperature and report whether it was on or off.

I wanted more experience with programming apps, so I decided to make an app to control this as well. I made an app that the PHP page to control the thermostat and read the temperature. Here is what the app and DAQ board looked like: