Do I have to build my own touchscreen thermostat?

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If we're on this subject, do you happen to know any active esp Lemmy communities?

thanks and merry christmas

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Heat pumps are an entirely different story, and I don't have too much experience with them, most of the splits I've seen come with their own remote controls. I was talking on more traditional wall heaters, central air/furnace/forced air, etc.

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Most programmers (those doing fancy GUIs and C# programming on a PC) would be seriously out of their league if they ever actually tried to program such a thermostat. Or any other embedded system. You really need a special skillset and hardware knowledge to even get a simple embedded system running. This is what my trainee just learned the hard way in the last weeks...

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Yes, the C/blue wire is common, basically a neutral for the 24v system and necessary for more digital thermostats to keep the thermostat powered (some can work without the c wire, but it depends on the unit feeding power). The old mechanical ones work on the tilting mercury thing or copper coil for temp sensing, and only require the red wire to touch their respective wires to call whatever function, but the digital ones do the same thing on a switching level. I know there are additional wire sometimes for multistage heat and zoning, but as far as I know it's the same principle. I'll be honest I'm an electrician by trade and not an HVAC guy, and I know some of the more intricate systems can deviate from this, but your average residential system should be similar or damn near the same as my original comment (granted my experience is in Southern CA, so there are possibly regional differences with oil furnaces, radiator systems, etc).

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Everything is laugh and giggles until the thermostat is turing complete.

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"Smartknob View"

Sabata

Tape a raspberry pi to the wall with some relays and a temperature sensor dangling and call it a day. Anything else is spying on you.

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Except thermostats. You literally could do it with a Raspberry Pi, some 24V relays and a temperature sensors. Thermostats are not that hard.

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Inputs and outputs mapping sure is hard /s

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Program it in increments?

My house has a lot of thermal mass. In the morning when the temperature comes up, it tends to overshoot after working hard to heat all that thermal mass. However I found it much more comfortable to add an increment: half an hour at a degree colder than I want. Now it can heat all that thermal mass while overheating the air is just playing into my hands

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I’ve got it programmed in increments of a half a degree per hour. The thing still goes into panic mode.

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It’s actually surprising that we expect so much from a smart thermostat. Wouldn’t it be far smarter to sell a dumb thermostat on a local iot network and put the smarts in your automation hub? People who want the extra functionality would be good with that and people who don’t would appreciate saving the money

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If my choices are a z-wave/zigbee thermostat that connects to my HomeAssistant instance and a Raspberry Pi that I have to maintain, I'll pick the z-wave one (and I did, 10 years ago. It's been rock solid.)

For my smart devices I prefer devices that can't send information over the internet no matter what. I don't want to worry about my thermostat mining bitcoin for some dude in China.

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A smart thermostat is the only smart device I own (ecobee). I figure it actually is better than something I could design in a week so it seemed worth it. Do you know of an actually competitive open hardware/open source solution?

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Smart thermostats do way more than just set the temperature: that's table stakes. Off the top of my head the ecobee will:

Set the temperature also taking the room's humidity into account
Communicate with sensors throughout your house
Can change things via the Internet in case you accidentally forget to set it to a better temperature when you'll be gone for a few days
Tweak your schedule based on demand

I'm probably missing things, but they're actually pretty useful, and I'm someone who thinks most IoT is shit.

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Well that's not quite true.

I have some z-wave thermostats, which I know do not talk to the Internet, just a local system with a zwave dongle.

For a relative, recently set up a similar setup, but with a homekit thermostat. Similar deal, though it really really wanted to connect to a cloud server and you kind of had to trick it to a non apple homekit setup. The follow on model from that brand did drop homekit support, presumably because they wanted to force their cloud servers, which became required for any advanced functionally.

There are ways to get automation friendly devices without a cloud connected requirement, though admittedly you have to be paying pretty close attention. Generally offerings for business are more likely to be locally workable, but that's hardly a given either

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As the other poster said, both Zigbee and Zwave devices do not talk to the Internet. They can't even connect to your Wi-Fi anyway. They need to connect to a device that acts as a router but specifically for Zigbee or Zwave, usually called a Hub or Coordinator.

There's many different hubs around. Many commercial ones do indeed connect directly to the WiFi and therefore internet. But nothing is stopping you from buying a USB Dongle Hub with open source firmware and plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, if you want to eliminate the potential spying.

The Zigbee and Zwave networks inherently cannot communicate with the Internet. So the only risk of spying is if you installed something in the Raspberry that spies on you.

Both Philips Hue and IKEA Trådfri and many other vendors simply use Zigbee, which means you can bring your own Hub and completely eliminate the risk of spying.

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Which are all things you can easily do with an RPi and some simple python. My response was to OP stating that embedded systems are hard.

If you’re using a specific embedded system and want to make it pretty, sure that could pose some issues, but if you want to make something functional that matches what a smart thermostat can do, there’s not much behind it.

Sabata

Do you trust every device you buy without question?

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Noting ESP specific to my knowledge, but there is a home assistant community.