[OpenTRV-dev] New Member - Introduction

[Rob May]

Hi all,

Damon just added me to this group and suggested that I introduce myself.

As a background, I'm trained in general engineering , but have focused for
the last 20 years in the IT side - mainly in the broadcast industry, and
currently I design end-2-end broadcast systems for some of the biggest
broadcasters in the world;  I'm competent with a variety of programming
languages (prefer C and Perl, but have experience elsewhere and can read
most codebases), and I'm happy wielding a soldering iron - although I
haven't done any electronic design in close on 20 years.  Parts of the
company I work for are heavily involved in IOT, although I am not well
connected in that space.

At this time I'm not sure how much I will be able to contribute;  I'd like
to think that I could be an active contributor - but with a full-time job
and a young family the reality may turn out differently.

I have been considering the problem of a single central temperature
measurement for controlling home heating for some time (my house suffers
badly from inability to keep the bedrooms warm enough at night without
overheating downstairs) and have recently acquired some of these sensors (
http://www.wirelesstag.net/index.html) and I was on the look out for some
motorised TRVs that I could hack to write my own control system, when I
stumbled on the OpenTRV project.  It appears that you have done a lot of
what I want - although I also want to be able to drive schedules and
predict when to turn heating on to meet target temperatures at specific
times (for example I believe that being able to get a bedroom up to
temperature at the time the alarm goes off would allow greater overnight
back-off).   I've started looking through what you've been up to - and have
scanned and mostly understood the PICAXE code, and will get onto the
Arduino code shortly.

I'm not sure how your timelines will pan out, but I want to try to have
something up in my house for next winter.   I like the price of the Conrad
valves that you're currently using, and I think that the rev7 board/conrad
valve, possibly with some customised version of your software would be
ideal for what I'm thinking of.

As my starter questions:
(1) Are there any Rev7 boards available currently?  If not would anyone
want to share the costs of a small production run?
(2) Are there any notes anywhere on how the Rev7 board is to be fitted to
the Conrad Valve - are there still issues that need to be resolved here?

I look forward to getting to know you all.

Rob.
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